Psychological Safety in Change

Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, studied hospital and manufacturing teams in the 1990s. In her 1999 paper she defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and found it linked to learning behavior: asking for help, seeking feedback, discussing errors and experimenting.

Three clarifications prevent common misreadings:

• It is a group property: members of the same team tend to hold similar beliefs about it.
• It is not about being nice. Safe teams disagree openly; the conflict is about the work, not the person.
• It is not low standards. Edmondson pairs safety with accountability: teams need both to learn and perform.

Psychological safety is therefore a condition for candor, not a guarantee of comfort.

Change creates exactly the risks that people avoid when they feel unsafe: admitting they do not understand a new process, reporting that a system does not work, or questioning a decision made by senior leaders.

At Brightwater Health, a new discharge process is piloted on two wards. On one ward, nurses report workarounds and near misses in the daily huddle, and the design is adjusted within weeks. On the other, problems stay hidden until an audit finds them. Same process; different safety.

Low safety also feeds what Schein calls learning anxiety: the fear of looking incompetent while acquiring new skills.

Psychological safety is therefore an early-warning system for a change, because it brings problems to the surface while they are still cheap to fix.

Edmondson groups leader actions into three areas:

1. Set the stage. Frame the change as a learning problem, not a pure execution task: say openly that the path is uncertain and that everyone's input is needed. Make the purpose and the stakes clear.
2. Invite participation. Show situational humility by acknowledging the limits of your own knowledge. Ask genuine questions, and create structures such as huddles, retrospectives and anonymous channels for input.
3. Respond productively. Thank people for raising problems, treat honest failures as information, and still address clear violations of rules or values.

The behaviors that destroy safety are the mirror image: public blame for mistakes, dismissing questions, or always having the answer.

Psychological safety is therefore built through what leaders do repeatedly, not through a single announcement.

Long before the team concept, the psychologist Carl Rogers described the climate in which people grow and change. In his 1957 paper on therapeutic change, he set out three core conditions offered by the helper:

• Congruence: being genuine, with words that match feelings and actions.
• Unconditional positive regard: accepting the person without judging their worth.
• Empathic understanding: grasping the other person's view from the inside and showing it.

Rogers' later writing on creativity described a similar climate of acceptance and freedom from judgment.

For a change leader, they mean honest communication, respect for people who struggle, and listening to understand rather than to persuade.

Rogers' conditions are therefore the interpersonal foundation on which team psychological safety rests.

A diverse change team, mixing functions, levels, backgrounds and ways of thinking, brings a wider range of views on risks and options. That benefit only appears if members voice those views, including views that contradict the majority or a senior member.

Without psychological safety, people with minority views stay quiet and the team defaults to the dominant opinion. At Harbourside Council, the chair of a housing-service change team that includes front-line officers, IT, finance and a tenant representative asks each member in turn for concerns before decisions, so quieter voices are heard.

Psychological safety is therefore what turns a diverse team into a better-informed one.

The concept has a substantial research base; Edmondson and Lei (2014) review its history and findings. Its limits are mostly about how it is applied.

• Misread as comfort. Teams can confuse safety with avoiding hard conversations, which lowers standards.
• Hard to build in a crisis. Job losses create real risk that leader behavior cannot remove; honesty about uncertainty matters more than reassurance.
• Measured by perception. Survey scores reflect what people are willing to report, which is itself affected by safety.

Psychological safety is therefore a necessary condition for learning during change, not a complete change approach.