Psychological safety is not immunity from consequences, nor is it a state of high self-regard. In psychologically safe workplaces, people know they might fail, they might receive performance feedback that says they're not meeting expectations, and they might lose their jobs due to changes in the industry environment or even to a lack of competence in their role. These attributes of the modern workplace are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!

The study [on what made the best teams] examined several possibilities: Did it matter if teammates have similar educational backgrounds? Was gender balance important? What about socializing outside of work? No clear set of parameters emerged. Project Aristotle, as the initiative was codenamed, then turned to studying norms; that is, the behaviors and unwritten rules to which a group adheres often without much conscious attention. Eventually, as Duhigg wrote, the researchers “encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers [and] everything suddenly fell into place.

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.

The data are consistent in this simple but interesting finding: psychological safety seems to “live” at the level of the group. In other words, in the organization where you work, it’s likely that different groups have different interpersonal experiences; in some, it may be easy to speak up and bring your full self to work. In others, speaking up might be experienced as a last resort - as it did in some of the patient-care teams I studied. That’s because psychological safety is very much shaped by local leaders.

Having begun his career at Daini in 1982, when it was still under construction, Masuda was intimately acquainted with the plant. That knowledge allowed him to give each group detailed instructions about where to go and what to do. to give each group detailed instructions about where to go and what to do. Concerned that fear might interfere with workers' ability to remember his instructions, he made the groups repeat the instructions back to him before they left. The point was not to command action but to assist them in acting quickly should the situation change, and their safety be compromised.