We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety.

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.

One of the most important things to keep in mind, wherever you work, is that the failure of an employee to speak up in a crucial moment cannot be seen. This is true whether that employee is on the front lines of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive board room. And because not offering an idea is an invisible act, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. This means that psychologically safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.

Today, over a thousand research papers in fields ranging from education to business to medicine, have shown that teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine even lower patient mortality. Why might this be the case? Because physiological safety helps people take the interpersonal risks that are necessary for achieving excellence in a fast-changing, interdependent world. When people work in psychologically safe contexts, they know that questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and errors and failure are discussable. In these environments, people can focus on the work without being tied up in knots about what others might think of them. They know that being wrong won’t be a fatal blow to their reputation. Psychological safety plays a powerful role in the science of failing well. It allows people to ask for help when they're in over their heads, which helps eliminate preventable failures. It helps them report -and hence catch and correct- errors to avoid worse outcomes, and it makes it possible to experiment in thoughtful ways to generate new discoveries. Think about the teams that you’ve been a part of at work, or at school, in sports, or in your community.

When a group is higher in psychological safety, it’s likely to be more innovative, do higher-quality work, and enjoy better performance, compared to a group that is low in psychological safety. One of the most important reasons for these different outcomes is that people in psychologically safe teams can admit their mistakes. These are teams where candor is expected. It’s not always fun, and certainly it’s not always comfortable, to work in such a team because of the difficult conversations you will sometimes experience. Psychological safety a team is virtually synonymous with a learning environment in a team. Everyone makes mistakes (we are all fallible), but not everyone is in a group where people feel comfortable speaking up about them. And it’s hard for teams to learn and perform well without psychological safety.