“Sociological” Safety

By Tom Geraghty

The term psychological safety has been in use since Carl Rogers’ work in the 1950s and was applied to organisational contexts by Schein and Bennis (among others) in the 1960s. Since Amy Edmondson’s influential research in 1999, psychological safety has gained widespread recognition as a foundational aspect of healthy group dynamics, supporting not just safety, innovation and productivity, but inclusion and wellbeing too.

Psychological safety is defined as the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the belief that we are able to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes, and that we won’t suffer negative social or professional consequences as a result.

Not everyone is entirely comfortable with the term “psychological safety”. Every now and then, there are calls to rename or redefine it. This is understandable – language evolves as our understanding deepens. And as the concept of psychological safety continues to gain traction, it’s natural we question whether the name accurately reflects what it describes. In particular, some argue that the term overly emphasises the individual, when in practice psychological safety is shaped by deeply social forces.

It’s a valid critique, and one worth sitting with. At its core, the experience of psychological safety is subjective and internal – it’s individually psychological. We don’t (yet?) possess the ability to read each others’ minds, access each other’s inner worlds or possess a truly collective consciousness. So the belief that it’s safe to speak up is held in the mind of an individual, which is why the concept is anchored in psychology. But that belief doesn’t emerge in a vacuum.

“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
— C. Wright Mills

Group norms, power dynamics, historical experiences, and systemic inequities all contribute to what Detert and Burris refers to as the “calculus of voice” – the moment-to-moment cost–benefit analysis of whether to ask a question, admit a mistake, or share a concern or idea. Collective pressures shape what we believe.

Psychological safety is an individual, internal experience shaped by collective factors like group norms, power dynamics, and systemic inequities, all of which influence our personal cost–benefit analysis of whether it’s safe to speak up.

This is where sociological thinking becomes indispensable. While psychology asks “What’s happening inside a person’s head?”, sociology asks “How do our systems, structures and cultures shape behaviour?” Both are essential lenses for understanding how psychological safety is fostered and sustained.

To illustrate the difference between psychological and sociological “safety”:

Although experienced individually, psychological safety doesn’t exist in a social vacuum. Studies show that it is strengthened, or eroded, by a range of sociological factors including:

• Power structures and gradients. The greater the power differential, the harder it can be to raise concerns or challenge someone ‘higher up’.
• Formal structures. Hierarchies, org charts, and informal networks all affect who feels safe to speak and when.  
• Reward and punishment systems. For example, error-reporting systems that are perceived as punitive or incentives that encourage zero-sum behaviours in teams can both discourage openness.
• Norms and values. Cultures that glorify perfectionism, fire-fighting or heroic individualism can discourage the behaviours that foster psychological safety.
• National culture, religion and belief. Norms around respect for authority and elders, politeness, collectivism vs individualism, religious rules and even eye contact, all affect how psychological safety is expressed and perceived.
• Institutional and systemic inequities. Factors such as racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and socioeconomic inequality make psychological safety unevenly distributed: the stakes of speaking up are higher for some than others.

In this sense, we might say that the experience of psychological safety is psychological, but the practice of fostering it is largely sociological. Context drives behaviour. And it’s important to note that we’re not simply passive subjects of these factors – psychological safety is not simply “done to us”. Our own behaviours affect how others feel, and therefore behave, around us. In effect, we can affect our own sense of psychological safety through influencing the dynamics of the groups we are in. Psychological safety isn’t just a leadership responsibility.

Lewin’s equation states that behaviour is a function of the person and their environment: B = f(P, E)

So, should we call it sociological safety? 

It’s an interesting thought, but on balance, I think not. There’s a good reason to keep the term psychological safety as it is. Fundamentally, the core of the concept remains an individual belief: I feel safe to speak up here. This internal perception, shaped by context but housed in the mind, is what decades of empirical research have measured, explored and built upon. As we’ve explored previously, it’s important to maintain this precise conceptual anchor because continually redefining the term risks what some scholars call epistemic drift – where a concept becomes so stretched and diluted that it loses precision, power, and practical meaning.

After all, we don’t rename “mental health” because it has many sociological and environmental causes.

That doesn’t mean we ignore the sociological side. Quite the opposite. By holding both perspectives together, we gain a more complete understanding, and a better chance of doing the real work of fostering psychological safety.

The belief that the group we are in possesses psychological safety arises in individuals, but it is profoundly shaped by systems. Emphasising the sociological influences helps challenge a common misconception: that psychological safety is a matter of personality or confidence. It’s not about just being “braver” – it’s about being in an environment where speaking up doesn’t carry an unreasonable cost.

In short: the inner belief of psychological safety arises from past and present outer conditions. When we focus only on people, we risk individualising what is often a systemic issue. When we focus only on systems, we risk overlooking the responsibility and accountability of people, including ourselves, within the system.

The best outcomes emerge when we do both: fix the systems and coach the people.

Further Reading:

The History of Psychological Safety

The Definition of Psychological Safety

Schein’s 3 Layers of Organisational Culture

Typologies of Power

Reducing Power Gradients 

Psychological Safety, Diversity and Inclusion

How We Respond Matters

Psychological Safety in Practice

Can your team take a joke? Why humour is a powerful signal of psychological safety

In many workplaces, humour feels risky, even inappropriate. In this new Psych Safety guest post, humour expert Jason Rawding explores how the thoughtful use of humour can help create a culture of openness, connection and psychological safety – if we understand how to use it wisely. From awkward banter to the power of self-deprecating stories and absurdity, Jason shares some practical insights and pitfalls to avoid.

Humour and Psychological Safety
*We have a Humour and Psychological Safety open enrolment workshop in the planning – contact us to be added to the ‘first to find out’ list and we’ll let you know once we get dates confirmed.

“Learning Styles”

The ‘learning styles’ myth is back under the spotlight in this new paper by John Hattie and Timothy O’Leary. Despite being widely debunked, the idea that we should teach (or treat) people according to a fixed ‘learning style’, matching our teaching approach to their preferred style for every task still stubbornly persists in many workplaces and classrooms.

Categorising people in this way (indeed, categorising people in general) can limit potential, ignore context, and undermine equity and inclusion. Instead, we should adopt practices and behaviours that allow everyone to learn and interact in the way that suits them (and the group they’re in) best, along with the task complexity and learning goal in that particular context.

Women in Leadership

Here’s an interesting paper by Buss, Andler, and Tiberius that provides a comprehensive synthesis (though somewhat US-centric) of two decades of empirical research on female leadership, encompassing 247 studies published between 2003 and 2023. The paper examines the factors influencing both the emergence and effectiveness of women leaders, organising these into a framework that includes individual traits, perceptions and stereotypes, leadership behaviours, and contextual influences.

Their findings highlight persistent gender biases that hinder women’s access to leadership roles, despite growing evidence that women are often perceived as more effective leaders than men. While the concept of psychological safety isn’t directly addressed in the paper, the findings are relevant to understanding how social context, leadership style, and gender dynamics can contribute to, or undermine it.

My apologies, the paper is not open-access. But see below…

Accessing academic papers if you’re not an academic

Knowledge is one of the rare things that you can give away and still not lose anything. 

A lot of valuable knowledge is often restricted to only an academic audience, but if you don’t have access to an academic institution account in order to read paywalled journals and papers, there are some things you can do:

Google Scholar is a great search engine for academic content. It can take some time to find what you’re looking for sometimes though. Here’s a great guide to getting the most out of it.

When you’ve found what you’re looking for, if it appears to be behind a paywall or is otherwise not accessible, “Unpaywall” is a great tool that searches the rest of the internet for the paper that you’re interested in, and will tell you if there’s an open access version you can read.

You may also find that some papers were initally open access and available, but have since been moved behind a paywall. This is often the case for some high profile sites. In this case, you can use the Wayback machine and simply paste the URL or use the search tool to find the archived version, which may be available to you.

If that fails, you can often find the paper on ResearchGate, and contact the authors for a copy – either through ResearchGate itself, or by finding their contact details at their institution. Most authors will be happy to share it with you, and often even answer questions for you too!

Reddit’s Scholar community is also a great place to search and ask for papers and articles.

If all that fails, there are other ways of hunting down a paper, which we can’t comfortably link to here, but you can probably work out…