Psychological safety is being significantly misunderstood, according to the May-June, 2025 edition of the Harvard Business Review.
Academics Amy C. Edmondson and Michaela J Kerrissey, have identified six misconceptions about psychological safety that that they say are leading organizations astray.
Psychological safety, a concept pioneered by Edgar Schein (whom I have had the pleasure meeting in the San Francisco Bay area before he passed away) and Warren Bennis in the 1960s and further explored by Amy Edmondson, refers to the belief that one can take interpersonal risks in a work environment without fear of negative consequences. Research consistently shows a positive correlation between psychological safety and various outcomes, including improved team performance, creativity, innovation, and employee engagement.
Studies and research, such as an article from the MIT Sloan Management Review, consistently show that a psychologically safe workplace leads to higher employee engagement, reduced turnover, greater innovation, and increased productivity.
However, the Harvard Business Review authors have observed that psychological safety is being so misunderstood, that it risks organizational performance.
Here are the six misconceptions about psychological safety they have identified:
No. 1. Psychological safety means being nice
Thinking that psychological safety is about being nice or feeling comfortable is one of the most common misconceptions. The authors see it in companies and schools alike. For instance, a graduate student the authors know asked to shift from in-person to virtual attendance because she found participating in a large class uncomfortable. The accommodation, she said, was important for her psychological safety.
The authors further explain: “Safety and comfort are not synonymous. Safety is the condition of being protected from danger, harm, or injury. Comfort is a state of ease and freedom from pain. Wanting to be nice, people avoid being honest and, whether they realize it or not, collude in producing ignorance and mediocrity. Because without candid feedback and open sharing of information—bad and good—coordination, quality, and learning on a team or a project suffer. Teams that don’t surface hard truths perform worse than those that do.”
The authors find it helpful to think of psychological safety as a shared sense of permission for candor. Safety and comfort are not synonymous. Safety is the condition of being protected from danger, harm, or injury. Comfort is a state of ease and freedom from pain. Wanting to be nice, people avoid being honest and, whether they realize it or not, collude in producing ignorance and mediocrity. Without candid feedback and open sharing of information—bad and good—coordination, quality, and learning on a team or a project suffer. Teams that don’t surface hard truths perform worse than those that do.
No. 2 Psychological safety means getting your way
Less common but equally problematic is the misconception people have that psychological safety means their views should prevail. A healthcare executive told the authors that a staff member had complained, “You didn’t support my idea in that meeting, and that made me feel psychologically unsafe.”
That employee, along with many other people, the authors explain, did not understand that psychological safety is about making sure leaders or teams hear what people think. It’s not about forcing them to agree with what they hear. The goal is to reach a good decision or prevent a defect in a product. It’s helpful to think of psychological safety not as a gift for one participant but rather as an environment for the whole team.
Thee authors conclude that leaders don’t need to agree with everyone’s input. And they shouldn’t tolerate problematic behavior. Sanctions for bullying, harassment, disrespect, and unethical conduct are vital to ensuring a positive learning environment.
No. 3 Psychological safety means job security
Shocked by Google’s announcement in January 2023 that it was laying off 12,000 employees, multiple workers posted on social media sites that the action was counter to their company’s commitment to psychological safety. In a town hall meeting, one Google employee expressed this sentiment out loud.
The authors explain that psychological safety doesn’t mean freedom from layoffs. It’s freedom to be constructively candid. Ironically, the employee demonstrated that psychological safety did exist at Google when he stood up and criticized the company to its senior leaders.
No. 4 Psychological safety requires a trade-off with performance
The authors write that some leaders worry that fostering psychological safety among employees will make it hard to address weaknesses and assign accountability for achieving excellence. They seem to think of the two as being on a spectrum, with psychological safety on one end and accountability for performance on the other. But that’s wrong.
Psychological safety and accountability are distinct dimensions. To decide which is more important is to impose a false dichotomy. When both are low, performance and morale clearly suffer.
In any uncertain environment, the authors maintain, superb performance requires a commitment to both high standards and psychological safety. That is because psychological safety enables learning—it helps surface information and knowledge vital for competing in a changing world.
No. 5. Psychological safety is a policy
I was stunned to read in the author’s article that in April 2024, the Rhode Island state senate passed Bill 2473A, the Workplace Psychological Safety Act, which sought to create psychologically safe work environments. It enabled employees to sue their employer for damages if it didn’t. As of the writing of their article, the authors state the bill hasn’t progressed beyond the state senate. This piece of legislature, the authors allege, reflects the common but misguided belief that organizations should mandate psychological safety. Organizations can’t mandate psychological safety any more than organizations can mandate things like trust and motivation.
Psychological safety is not a quick fix, the authors assert. You can’t pull a lever and make it happen. Telling people in a company or on a team that they must have psychological safety “or else” will not produce it. In fact, it’s more likely to result in leaders being kept in the dark about what’s really going on.
Psychological safety, rather than being created by a policy, is built in a group, interaction by interaction. The authors write that it takes intention and effort to create a climate of candor. It’s particularly helpful when leaders consciously use three tools:
- Messaging: Leaders should make statements that highlight the challenges of the situation the organization faces.
- Modeling: They must also be role models for asking good questions, listening intently, and acknowledging that it’s OK not to know all the answers.
- Mentoring: Leaders need to give people feedback on their impact—on how well they invite and respond to others’ input—and work to minimize the negative consequences anyone on the team suffers from speaking up.
No. 6: Psychological safety requires a top-down approach
The authors write that they frequently hear employees say that an organization’s leaders must be the ones to establish psychological safety. It’s true that what leaders do matters—they have an enormous impact on a team or an organization’s culture. According to the authors, hierarchy is deeply ingrained in our psyche. Employees instinctively care what leaders think; they feel their future may depend on making a positive impression on them. But ultimately, psychological safety is built by everyone—at all levels of the company.
Yes, it’s both powerful and helpful when senior executives in a company strike a sincere tone of humility and curiosity, conveying that they understand their dependence on others’ input. But it’s possible to create a motivated, psychologically safe, high-performing team anywhere. The authors encourage leaders to start by focusing their own teams.
The authors have created a simple and practical framework for assessing the quality of a work conversation. Employees can readily assess—while a conversation is underway—a group’s performance along three dimensions: the degree to which employees are listening and sharing, the presence of both advocacy and inquiry, and the degree of progress made. If they pay attention to the dynamics taking place, they can correct course as needed. High-quality conversation is a team sport; it helps when all are willing to do their part to help the team perform.
Below is the author’s recommendations on how to determine if your employees are having a high-quality conversation.,
Is Your Team Having a High-Quality Conversation?
To determine whether it is, try employing a simple scale—such as one to five or low, medium, and high—to answer the questions below. You can use the examples of positive and negative behaviors to guide your ratings. Then review your responses to identify potential pitfalls and spark a dialogue on how to overcome them.
| Attribute | Self-assessment questions | What to watch for |
| People Are Contributing and Listening |
|
Positive: Everyone appears engaged in the substance of the discussion. Negative: One person or a few people dominate the conversation. |
| Advocacy and Inquiry Are Both Present |
|
Positive: Good questions are frequent and expand understanding. Negative: People get stuck trying to prove their original points, regardless of new information. |
| Mutual Learning and Progress Are Happening |
|
Positive: The conversation is disciplined, systematic, and data-driven. Negative: The conversation goes around in circles. |
Institute structures for sharing reflections and tracking progress
According to the authors, psychological safety is reinforced by structures and rituals that prompt teams to talk about their progress. The authors don’t believe there is one best way to do this; any number of approaches can work. What matters is the discipline of offering honest appraisals of what’s going on with the work (performance against goals) and of the team climate and quality of interactions.
The authors conclude that timely input, candid feedback, and robust debate are as vital for ensuring innovation as for preventing strategic blunders. Leaders who create the kinds of teams that practice these ways of interacting will be poised to outperform those who do not. Ultimately, psychological safety is about changing the expectations for how we work together to successfully navigate the storms ahead.
About Victor
Victor Assad is the CEO of Victor Assad Strategic Human Resources Consulting and Managing Partner of InnovationOne, LLC. He works with organizations to transform HR and recruiting, implement remote work, and develop extraordinary leaders, teams, and innovation cultures. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Hack Recruiting: The Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process, and Digitization. He is quoted in business journals such as The Wall Street Journal, Workforce Management, and CEO Magazine. Victor, with his partner Dr. Brooke Dobni, has partnered with The Conference Board and the US Department of Energy on innovation research. Subscribe to his weekly blogs at http://www.VictorHRConsultant.com