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.
Related Quotes
In hesitating and then choosing not to speak up, Christina was making a quick, not entirely conscious, risk calculation – the kind of micro-assessment most of us make numerous times a day.
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.
Yet to view the customer-accounts fraud as the result of individually-corrupt salespeople does not square with the widespread nature of the behavior in the company, which points to a system set up to fail. Set up to fail by the pernicious combination of a top-down strategy and insufficient psychological safety to encourage sharing bad news up the hierarchy.
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.