The Power of Psychological Safety: Building High-Performance Teams

"I feel really safe in this team!" declared a member of the executive team.

I was a little taken aback by this heartfelt declaration in the middle of a general conversation about culture. It was a bit random, especially since I hadn't primed the discussion by talking about 'psychological safety,' per se. It just popped out.

I had recently read a provocative article stating that it’s not the leader’s prerogative to declare their team as “psychologically safe”; that judgment belongs to team members—assuming they feel safe enough to speak up. So, it was particularly poignant and refreshing to hear such an unguarded and vulnerable declaration. Given the day's flow and understanding the context of where this team had come from, I noted the comment and pressed on, observing even more closely for evidence that members indeed felt safe.

Psychological Safety and Team Performance

Psychological safety has gained recognition as a crucial condition for high-performance teams and organisations.

Popularised by Google’s 2016 Project Aristotle, named after Aristotle's quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," the analysis of 180 active teams concluded that psychological safety was the critical factor for team success. Team members who felt safe to take risks, make mistakes, and express their opinions without fear of negative consequences were more likely to innovate, collaborate, and solve problems effectively.

Over at the other software behemoth, Microsoft, Satya Nadella’s cultural transformation emphasised a shift from a "know-it-all" to a "learn-it-all" mindset, fostering an environment where employees felt safe to share ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment. This focus on psychological safety was pivotal in driving collaboration, innovation, and overall performance within the company. To read more about Microsoft’s extraordinary cultural turnaround, read my post, The cartoon that transformed Microsoft's culture.

The Science Says It Works

Importantly, the science underpinning psychological safety is robust—perhaps that's why it works!

The theoretical underpinnings of psychological safety date back to the founders of organisational culture and organisational development, Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis. However, it was Amy Edmondson's somewhat counterintuitive finding that teams with a poor climate and culture reported fewer instances of patient medication misdoses. On the other hand, the teams with the most reported misdoses had greater psychological safety. When team members felt safe to speak up, they were more likely to report errors, including medication misdoses. So, next time you are in a hospital and about to go under the knife, hope that your surgical team’s culture is one that calls out concerns, reports errors, and, most importantly, learns from their mistakes to improve their practice—one that enjoys a psychologically safe culture.

Edmondson defines psychological safety as "the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” Importantly, she emphasises that psychological safety is fundamentally an interpersonal team dynamic. Teams that establish interpersonal norms supportive of psychological safety tend to perform better.

Psychological Safety Is About Interpersonal Risk-Taking

If psychological safety is fundamentally an interpersonal dynamic, you would expect it to map onto the interpersonal circumplex (IPC)—and it does.

First conceptualised by Timothy Leary in the 1950s, the interpersonal circumplex uses a circular graph to conceptualise and measure interpersonal behaviour. Since then, most scientific versions have been developed for research and clinical practice. Use in organisations or workplace settings has been limited, with the Circumplex Leadership Scan (CLS; Redeker et al., 2014), which assesses leadership styles associated with each IPC octant, being the first (Locke, 2019).

In a joint development between the Culture Capital Group and Professor Ken Locke of the University of Idaho, the Circumplex Team Scan (CTS) was developed to measure team interaction and communication norms (or culture) reflecting each segment of the interpersonal circumplex (see Figure 2). While other circumplex inventories assess individuals, the CTS is unique in being the only inventory to apply the IPC to the assessment of teams.

The interpersonal circumplex is defined by a vertical agentic axis ranging from active, assertive stances (top) to passive, timid stances (bottom), and a horizontal communal axis ranging from warm, affiliative stances (right) to cool, hostile stances (left).

Each segment progressively reflects a different blend of agency and communion: adjacent segments are more similar than non-adjacent segments; opposite interpersonal stances occupy antipodal segments. The circumplex has been successfully used to assess, analyse, and juxtapose various constructs related to social interactions between leaders and their followers, team members, and entire organisations.

Culture Predicts Psychological Safety

Researching team performance at Georgia Institute of Technology, Chris Martin, used the CTS to understand the team social norms (culture) that produced climate measures of psychological safety, inclusion, and justice.

In Locke and Martin’s (2022) scientific paper, these climate outcomes of culture are defined as:

• Safety: Encompasses individuals feeling both respected and unafraid (reflecting agentic norms) and trusting that they can depend on their teammates for support (reflecting communal norms) (Edmondson, 1999).
• Inclusion: Encompasses individuals experiencing opportunities to authentically express their unique selves (reflecting agentic norms) and experiencing themselves as embraced and cared about (reflecting communal norms) (Jansen et al., 2014).
• Justice: Encompasses providing individuals respect and voice (reflecting agentic norms) and treating them fairly and equally (reflecting communal norms) (Colquitt & Rodell, 2015).

Figure 3. visualises how safety, inclusion, and justice map onto the N and M octants of the interpersonal circumplex—the Engaged & Open cultural styles of the Circumplex Team Scan (Locke, 2019).

Members of Engaged & Open team cultures report they “welcome opportunities to interact and communicate with each other; they are involved and eager to share their perspectives.”

Further, a 2023 analysis by the Culture Capital Group of 93 Australian workplace teams showed similar correlations between culture, as measured by the CTS, and climate outcomes. The more team members reported the Engaged & Open culture styles, the more likely they were to actively share their knowledge and expertise with one another, be satisfied, and enjoy working as a member of their team. Members experienced “feeling safe expressing my own creativity and initiative in this team.”

Unsafe Team Cultures

On the other hand, team members reporting feeling unsafe described Evasive & Guarded culture styles. They felt pressure to “ignore or avoid each other; avoid contributing because they doubted their contributions would be positively received.”

Of the 64 behaviours measured, the two most associated with the Evasive & Guarded culture styles and team members feeling unsafe were:

• Disrespecting each other
• Keeping their thoughts to themselves?

Conversely, in the 93 workplace teams we analysed, Martin and Locke’s findings were confirmed: psychologically safe teams excel in ‘forming’ and sustaining interpersonal norms that map onto the CTS’s Engaged & Open culture styles, particularly in the following behaviours:

• Having fun together
• Trusting each other

As team development facilitators, these are the behaviours we most often observe when working with psychologically safe teams.

What do psychologically safe teams look like? What are they doing differently?

The following circumplex highlights an extensive team development intervention we conducted across 19 teams in multiple countries. It was distinctive as one of those teams where; despite feeling tired and travel-weary, you leave the session feeling energised and excited.

This circumplex shows a healthy, high-performing, and innovative team culture. Dominated by the Engaged & Open culture styles, members felt psychologically safe to express their creativity and discuss new and innovative ways of developing their team and supporting their clients.

Factors that created this culture were:

• A clear aspiration for being a great team. They were proud of what they had collectively created and their impact on clients.
• A commitment to putting in real effort into promoting its values and behaviours.
• Fierce protection of the team culture they had developed—they owned it!
• Prioritising having fun and enjoying their work.
• Being very selective about who they allowed to join their tribe. They had adopted Atlassian’s 'no a@#$hole' policy and the 'slow to hire, quick to fire' principle.
• Seeing the recruitment of new members as a team responsibility. The team actively reached out to their personal networks to authenticate and verify a good fit when considering new recruits.
• Shared leadership, with team members taking accountability for the culture they had co-created. This was evidenced in the workshop by shared airtime among all members and the leader not standing out.

Working with this team was a rare treat, full of life, energy, creativity, and yes, fun! It was a highlight of my facilitation career.

Unsafe Teams?

Then, at the other extreme, are teams you remember for the wrong reasons—teams where you don’t need a scientifically validated diagnostic to know it's unsafe and emotionally dangerous.

Our flight had been delayed, and we arrived a few minutes late. As we walked into the boardroom, members failed to greet us, preferring to look out the window or play with their phones and laptops—you get the vibe. This was a team that was hurting. Over time, overt conflict and the Rude & Combative styles had shifted to more passive-aggressive, Evasive & Guarded behaviours.

Interpersonal trust, a key ingredient of psychological safety, had been completely violated. As facilitators, with only a few hours available, the wisest move was to abandon our high-performance team agenda and attempt to give the team an experience of psychological safety to rebuild enough trust to jump-start communication between members.?

To resuscitate this team, we took over the team’s social norms, directing and inviting each member to share what they needed from each other to do their jobs. Importantly, paraphrasing back to the feedback giver was critical to them feeling properly heard. On occasion, the giver and receiver had to adjust and repeat until both parties felt heard and understood. A key to this process was the members’ courage, despite the risks, to engage and speak up.

?After the session was over, while we were having our lunch, the manager pulled us over to view a group of people standing around a computer working together to solve a problem. It was the team we had worked with earlier in the day. I was puzzled—what was I looking at? This was significant; it was the first time in a very long time that the manager had observed his team collectively and with some animation, standing around problem-solving.

Team psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have

Team psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have; it is the foundation upon which team members feel safe to speak up and communicate effectively, which in turn is the foundation of collaboration and ultimately team performance.

Further Reading and References:

Culture Capital Group website

Interpersonal Solutions Group website

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Colquitt, J. A., & Rodell, J. B. (2015). Measuring justice and fairness. In R. S. Cropanzano & M. L. Ambrose (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of justice in the workplace (pp. 187–202). Oxford University Press.

Jansen, W., Otten, S., Zee, K., Der, Van., Amsterdam, V. U., & Jans, L. (2014). Inclusion: Conceptualization and measurement. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 370–385.

Leary, T. F. (1957). Interpersonal diagnosis of personality: A functional theory and methodology for personality evaluation. Oxford, UK: Ronald Press.

Locke, Kenneth D. (2019). “Development and Validation of a Circumplex Measure of the Interpersonal Culture in Work Teams and Organisations.” Frontiers in Psychology 10:850.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00850/full

Locke, K. D., & Martin, C. C. (2024). Evaluating an abbreviated version of the Circumplex Team Scan Inventory of Within-Team Interpersonal Norms. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 40(3), 184-194.?https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759/a000752

Redeker, M., de Vries, R. E., Rouckhout, D., Vermeren, P., & de Fruyt, F. (2012). Integrating leadership: The Leadership Circumplex.? European Journal of Work and Organisational Psychology. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2012.738671

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