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.

Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. In fact, you could say it’s the opposite. Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. It goes without saying that these are vital to learning and innovation. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what’s bothering them.

...a study in a Midwestern insurance company found that psychological safety predicted worker engagement. In turn, psychological safety was fostered by supportive relationships with coworkers.

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.