Edmondson 1999: Psychological Safety
Amy Edmondson’s Administrative Science Quarterly paper introduced psychological safety as a team-level construct and shaped a generation of research on team learning, error reporting, and innovation.
Citation: Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. doi:10.2307/2666999.
What the paper proposed
Edmondson defined team psychological safety as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” The construct describes a climate in which speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or admissions of mistake feels safe rather than career-threatening.
Crucially, Edmondson framed psychological safety as a team-level property, not an individual personality trait. Different teams in the same organisation, with similar individual members, can show different levels of psychological safety. This shifted the research focus from selecting brave individuals to creating climates that allow ordinary people to speak up.
The hospital study
The 1999 paper reported a multi-method field study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company. Edmondson’s key insight came from earlier work in hospitals where she found, counterintuitively, that better-performing nursing units reported more medication errors than worse-performing ones. The explanation was not that the better units made more errors; they reported more, because the climate made it safer to do so.
The 1999 manufacturing study extended this with a measurement instrument for psychological safety and a model linking it to team learning behaviour and team performance. Teams with higher psychological safety reported more learning behaviour (asking questions, seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting), which in turn predicted higher team performance ratings from external assessors.
The 7-item measure
Edmondson’s original 7-item team psychological safety scale (rated on a 7-point Likert) remains the most widely used measure of the construct. Sample items, in summary form:
- If you make a mistake on this team, it is not held against you.
- Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
- People on this team sometimes reject others for being different. (reverse-scored)
- It is safe to take a risk on this team.
- It is not difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
- No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
- Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilised.
The continuing influence
The 1999 paper has accumulated more than 17,000 citations on Google Scholar at the time of writing, and the construct has been replicated and extended across healthcare, software engineering, education, and military settings. Google’s Project Aristotle (2015), an internal study of what made teams effective at Google, identified psychological safety as the strongest predictor of team performance among the dynamics they measured.
The link to empathy and to the work covered on the empathy in leadership page is direct. Leaders cannot create psychological safety by decree; it is created by repeated empathic responses to bad news, mistakes, dissent, and risk-taking. Edmondson’s later book The Fearless Organization (2018) makes this connection explicit.
Common misreadings
- It is not about being “nice.” Edmondson has been clear that psychological safety does not mean low standards or avoiding hard feedback. It means making the act of giving and receiving hard feedback safer.
- It is not the same as trust. Trust is between two people. Psychological safety is a shared property of a team.
- It is not a leader-only construct. Leaders shape it disproportionately, but peer behaviour matters too.