Silence is instinctive and safe; it offers self-protection benefits, and these are both immediate and certain.

Their work shows that psychological safety makes it easier for people to speak up about problems and to alter and improve work processes rather than engaging in the counterproductive workarounds.

That they found it easier to fabricate false accounts than to report what they were learning in the field is as powerful a signal of low psychological safety as you can find.

I don't mean to imply that working in a fearless organization takes more effort or a tremendously difficult undertaking. It doesn't. But initially, when we've been entrenched in fear and its attendant mental frameworks, it's not always obvious.

In short, psychological safety is reinforced rather than harmed by fair, thoughtful responses to potentially dangerous, harmful, or sloppy behavior.