The term “psychological safety” itself was first coined in 1954 by clinical psychologist Carl Rogers in a collection of papers on Creativity, collated by P E Vernon, in the context of establishing conditions where an individual feels they possess “unconditional worth“, and fostering an environment where external evaluation is absent.
Subsequently introduced into the field of management studies by Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis in the 1960s, psychological safety was first defined as group phenomenon that reduces interpersonal risk. To quote Schein and Bennis’s book “PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE THROUGH GROUP METHODS : THE LABORATORY APPROACH” in 1965, psychological safety reduces “a person’s anxiety about being basically accepted and worthwhile”.
Deming, in his 14 Points for Management, also raises the point of reducing fear of interpersonal risk taking in point 8: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company”. This highlights a growing change in sentiment at the time, away from reductionist and Taylorist views of workers towards more a progressive paradigm of empowerment and engagement to improve business outcomes.
“Wherever there is fear, there will be wrong figures.”
– W E Deming, The New Economics.
William Kahn, in 1990, renewed interest in psychological safety with his paper “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work” where he described psychological safety as:
“the sense of being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status or career.” (p.705, Kahn, W.A., 1990. Psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work. Academy of management journal, 33(4), pp.692-724.) Kahn in this respect refers to an individual sense of safety, with the implication of a group dynamic that could result in negative consequences. As we’ll see, the concept has since expanded to explicitly describe a group phenomenon, under Amy Edmondson.
At the same time, progressive management paradigms such as safety culture, Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge and his 14 Points of Management, and the Toyota Production System (TPS) were emerging that introduced concepts such as the the Andon Cord, which empowers employees to raise issues or concerns around safety and process (which is exactly what Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa).
Google’s Ngram shows interest in psychological safety in the literature remaining fairly steady from 1950 until around 2000, then beginning to climb after Edmondson published her 1999 research on high performing teams. Between 2013 and 2022, the term experienced a significant climb, as a result of Google’s Project Aristotle, the resulting NY Times article, and Edmondson’s “The Fearless Organisation” being published. Psychsafety.com was launched in 2019.
In 1999, Dr Amy Edmondson was studying clinical teams and the number of mistakes that different teams made. During her research she was surprised to find that the teams with a higher number of good outcomes actually made more mistakes than teams with fewer good outcomes. It was a surprising result, but after further investigation, Dr Edmondson discovered that in fact those teams with better outcomes were admitting more mistakes, whilst the teams with fewer good outcomes were more likely to hide theirs. As a result, Dr Edmondson codified the concept of psychological safety, namely: the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.
Dr Edmondson showed that psychological safety was a key factor in team performance, and continues to lead the field in expounding the importance of psychological safety in all fields of work and life, and literally wrote the book on psychological safety as well as a great deal of ongoing research.
This research built on the previous work by Schein, Bennis, Kahn and others to codify psychological safety and provide us with a more practical, actionable definition that aids practitioners (that is, me and you) to actually understand, foster and maintain psychological safety by asking:
Is it safe to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, and mistakes in this group?
Read more about the definition and evolution of psychological safety.
Subsequently, the 2019 State of DevOps reports have consistently highlighted the link between psychological safety and high performance in technology organisations. These reports, based on surveys of thousands of IT professionals, show that organisations with a culture of psychological safety are more likely to achieve higher levels of performance, deploy more frequently, and recover from failures faster. Psychological safety is key in fostering environments where continuous improvement and rapid innovation are possible.