Questioning Psychological Safety
- David Creelman
- 5月23日
- 読了時間: 2分
Consider this idea: In the airplane cockpit, the goal is not a feeling of psychological safety; the goal is to prevent the plane from crashing.
Does this distract us from the value of psychological safety, or does it give us an important insight into how to approach it?
Let’s dive in.
What the Research Says
In this LinkedIn post, “Psychological Safety: Is it really a thing?” Dr. Rob Briner points out that we don’t have much research on how to measure or improve psychological safety. He says it could be a useful concept, but probably isn’t yet.
The lack of evidence should caution us. Psychological safety may be useful in some circumstances, but it’s far from being the proven concept it is usually presented as.
Psychological safety is a seductive idea because no one likes managers who don’t listen to people lower on the status hierarchy. Since it’s emotionally appealing, it’s tempting for HR to latch on to it as a core value. The risk is that HR will undermine its impact when it falls for seductive ideas that are not grounded in evidence.
A Wise Approach to Seductive Ideas
It’s useful to go back to Amy Edmondson’s early research on psychological safety. Her foundational 1999 paper studied work teams in a manufacturing company, while related earlier and later research examined hospital teams, including operating-room settings, where lower-status members such as nurses needed to be able to speak up to higher-status clinicians. A similar issue appears in aviation safety research on authority gradients and crew resource management, where co-pilots must feel able to challenge captains when needed.
In the manufacturing teams, Edmondson found that teams performed better not just because they were confident or well-structured, but because people felt safe enough to engage in learning behaviours—especially admitting mistakes, asking questions, and discussing problems.
In operating rooms and aircraft cockpits, the issue is not learning behaviours; it’s life and death situations in a culture of strict hierarchy. The situations in operating rooms/aircraft and manufacturing teams have some things in common; they bear a family resemblance, but they are not quite the same.
Rather than emphasizing this broad, inadequately researched concept of “psychological safety”, HR would do well to put most of the focus on the specific mindsets and behaviours relevant to a given type of work. HR will have the most credibility and the most impact if it focuses on specific issues like mistakes in the cockpit, errors in the operating room, or lack of learning on teams, rather than championing an overarching concept like psychological safety.
Bottom line
The pilot's goal is not psychological safety — it's keeping the plane in the air. HR's goal is not psychological safety either. It's preventing crashes, reducing operating-room errors, and accelerating learning on the shop floor. Psychological safety may be one lever for achieving those things, in some contexts. But leading with the concept rather than the outcome gets it backwards — and costs HR credibility in the process.