Ep 4: Psychological Safety

What makes people feel safe enough to speak up, ask questions, or admit mistakes at work? In this episode of The Feeling Leader, we explore the concept of psychological safety and why it plays a critical role in how teams collaborate, learn, and adapt. Drawing on foundational research by Amy Edmondson and more recent studies on leadership and team dynamics, the episode examines how psychological safety develops within organizations and how leadership behaviors and communication cultures influence whether people feel comfortable taking interpersonal risks. We also explore why psychologically safe environments support learning, innovation, and well-being particularly in social work, nonprofit, and other human-serving organizations where collaboration and reflection are essential. 

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The Feeling Leader Podcast, episode 4.

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This is the Feeling Leader Podcast with Kristen De Long, doctoral candidate and licensed master clinical social worker. The information shared in this podcast is not a replacement for therapy or support from a mental health provider. And now, here's your host, Kristen De Long, DSW

Introduction: Psychological Safety

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(c), LMSW-C.

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Psychological safety refers to the shared belief within a team that individuals can speak openly, ask questions, acknowledge uncertainty, and raise concerns without fear of embarrassment, punishment, or rejection. Over the past several decades, researchers have examined how this relational climate shapes the way teams learn, communicate, and respond to complex challenges. Throughout this episode, we'll explore how the concept of psychological safety developed within organizational research, including foundational work by Amy Edmondson on team learning behavior. We'll also look at research examining how leadership behaviors influence whether individuals feel comfortable speaking up, how psychological safety operates in high-risk professions where communication can affect safety and performance, and how these dynamics shape feedback, innovation, and employee well-being. Finally, as always, we'll connect these insights to leadership in social work, nonprofit, and other human-serving connections, where collaboration, ethical reflection, and open communication are essential to supporting the people and the communities that organizations serve.

What is Psychological Safety?

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So let's get into it. When we think about leadership and organizational effectiveness, our attention is often drawn to the most visible aspects of work. We talk about strategy, technical expertise, operational systems. Organizations actually invest an enormous amount of resources into hiring talented professionals, designing effective protocols and efficient processes, leadership training, as we've discussed before, and developing sophisticated tools intended to improve productivity and performance. And all of these elements matter. Expertise and competence are essential for any group attempting to accomplish meaningful work. Yet anyone who has spent time working inside organizations, especially in the nonprofit space, knows that something else is always operating alongside these visible structures. Beneath the surface of meetings and project planning and outcomes lies a relational environment that quietly shapes how people interact with one another. Two teams may be composed of individuals with similar levels of experience, similar educational backgrounds, and similar resources. And on paper, these teams might appear almost identical, yet the experience of working within these teams can feel profoundly different. In one environment, conversations feel cautious. Individuals weigh their words carefully before speaking. Questions are asked tentatively, if they're even asked at all. People monitor the reactions of others before offering an idea or raising a concern. In another team, the atmosphere feels more open. Individuals ask questions freely. They can acknowledge some uncertainty without embarrassment. And ideas are shared while they are still incomplete, you know, kind of like, okay, hear me out. I don't have this all the way together yet. And even disagreements are explored rather than avoided in that environment. The difference between these environments rarely comes down to intelligence or motivation or even experience. Instead, it often reflects something much less visible, but deeply influential. It represents the relational climate that shapes how individuals experience participation within the group. Within organizational research, one of the most influential concepts used to describe this relational condition is psychological safety. Psychological safety refers to the shared belief within a team that individuals can take interpersonal risks without fear of humiliation, punishment, or rejection. In other words, people believe that speaking honestly, asking questions, admitting when they make a mistake, and offering new ideas will not damage or alter their standing within a group. And although these moments may seem small, they are actually the everyday interactions that determine whether teams are able to learn and adapt together. If individuals believe that raising a concern will be interpreted as incompetence, they may choose to remain silent. If a question risks embarrassment, they may be pretending to understand and go along with it. If proposing a new idea invites criticism or dismissal, they might keep that idea to themselves. Over time, these small decisions accumulate. Silence becomes normalized, and the collective intelligence of the group becomes constrained. When psychological safety is present, however, the dynamic begins to shift. Individuals are more willing to share incomplete ideas, raise concerns early, they might challenge some assumptions when something just seems a little off. Teams become better able to examine their work, their own work, collectively, rather than protecting individual reputation. These interactions create the conditions that allow groups to learn together. Although psychological safety has become widely discussed in contemporary leadership conversations, the concept itself emerged gradually through decades of research, examining how individuals and teams respond to uncertainty, change, and interpersonal risk within organizational life. To help us understand why psychological safety has become such an influential concept, we are going to look at how the idea developed within the broader history of organizational scholarship and research and development. And also the way it was developed from an interpersonal risk lens.

Interpersonal and Social Risk

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So at its core, psychological safety is concerned with a very specific question. What happens when individuals must decide whether or not to speak up within a group? Most of the behaviors that allow teams to learn and improve involve some form of interpersonal risk. These risks do not necessarily involve dramatic confrontations or major conflicts, but instead they appear in everyday interactions that most people experience regularly within organizational settings. Consider the moment when someone notices a potential problem in a project, but is unsure whether it is appropriate to raise the concern. Or the moment when a team member realizes they do not fully understand this new process, but they hesitate to ask a question because everybody else in the room seems to be getting it. Or the moment when an employee has an idea that challenges an already established approach, but wonders if sharing that idea is going to be interpreted as a criticism of somebody else's work or even a challenge to a manager. In each of these situations, individuals must make small but a very meaningful calculation. They ask themselves whether speaking openly is worth the potential social cost. And remember how in previous episodes we know the brain is social. And social pain is similar in how the brain experiences it as physical pain. So when we talk about social cost, we're not talking about something very shallow. It's actually very meaningful to us as feeling humans. So the questions individuals might ask to determine that social cost will be something like: will raising this concern make me look incompetent? Will it make me look unprepared? Will disagreeing with this idea damage my relationship with my colleagues or my supervisor? These decisions are rarely made consciously or analytically. Instead, they are shaped by the social signals individuals receive from the environment around them. We are constantly observing how others are treated. And this is true in workplace environments. People observe how others are treated when they admit mistakes. They notice how leaders respond when questions or even challenges are raised, and they watch how disagreements unfold within meetings. And over time, these experiences help individuals develop an implicit understanding of what is safe to say and what is better left unspoken because the social cost is too high. Psychological safety reflects the degree to which individuals believe that taking these interpersonal risks will be met with curiosity and respect rather than embarrassment, punishment, or rejection. Importantly, psychological safety does not eliminate disagreement or critical discussion. In fact, psychological safety, when observed in teams, those teams are often engaging in more rigorous debate because individuals feel comfortable challenging assumptions and exploring alternate perspectives. The key difference is that these disagreements occur within an environment where individuals trust that their contributions will be treated as part of the collective effort to improve the work rather than being viewed as a personal attack or an effort to slow down the work. Another common misunderstanding around psychological safety is that it implies some sort of lack of accountability or high standard. Research suggests that the most effective teams often combine high psychological safety with high expectations. Team members are encouraged to speak openly, but they are also encouraged and expected to engage seriously with the work and contribute to the group's goals. This balance allows teams to pursue ambitious objectives while maintaining the openness necessary for safety and learning. Understanding how this balance operates requires looking at how the concept of psychological safety first emerged.

Historical Development of Psychological Safety

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So let's take a look at the history. Their work suggested that learning new behaviors frequently produces anxiety because individuals must abandon their familiar routines and experiment with unfamiliar ways of working. When people attempt new behaviors, they risk making mistakes or appearing incompetent. Without some sense of psychological safety, this anxiety can become overwhelming and it can lead individuals to resist change or retreat into familiar patterns. Shine and Bennis therefore argued that individuals require a sense of psychological safety in order to tolerate the uncertainty associated with learning. Several decades later, the concept reappeared within a different stream of research through the work of organizational scholar William Kahn. In 1990, Kahn examined the conditions that allow individuals to engage fully with their work roles. Kahn observed that employees were more likely to express themselves openly and participate actively in their work when they felt safe from negative consequences to their self-image, status, and to their career. In this context, psychological safety is described as an individual's sense that they can express ideas, concerns, and questions without fear of damaging their reputation or relationships within the organization. Although both Shine and Khan contributed to important insights, their work largely approached psychological safety as a very individual experience. The concept changed significantly in the 1990s through the work of Amy C. Edmondson. Edmondson's research shifted the focus from individual perceptions to the collective climate within teams. Rather than asking whether a particular individual felt safe speaking up, she examined whether entire teams developed a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking was acceptable. This shift transformed how researchers understood the role of psychological safety in teams and organizational life. Instead of being viewed primarily as a personal feeling, psychological safety came to be understood as a property of the group, something that emerges through patterns of interaction between team members and through signals communicated by leaders. It was within this context that Edmondson conducted the study that would ultimately bring psychological safety to the center of research on teamwork and learning. So, as you all know now, Edmondson's research shifted the focus from individual perceptions to collective climate within teams. And rather than asking whether a particular individual felt safe speaking up, she examined whether the entire team had developed a shared belief that interpersonal risk taking was acceptable. Instead of being viewed primarily as a personal feeling, now psychological safety was being looked at from that team dynamic.

Amy Edmondon's Team Psychological Safety

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So let's take a closer look at Amy Edmondson's work and how it shaped our understanding of team psychological safety today. 1999, Amy Edmondson published a study titled Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly. Over the past two decades, this paper has become one of the most frequently cited studies in the field of organizational behavior and leadership studies. This study addressed a deceptively simple question. Why do some teams learn more effectively than others? Organizations had long recognized that learning was essential for improvement. Yet, in many workplaces, these learning conversations rarely occurred. Problems were discovered late, mistakes were corrected quietly rather than openly examined to find a pattern, questions were avoided, particularly in environments where individuals feared appearing incompetent. Edmondson suspected that the answer might lie in the relational dynamics within teams rather than in any of the technical expertise of the individuals themselves. To investigate this theory, she studied work teams within a large manufacturing organization. Her research combined surveys, interviews, and observational data in order to understand how team members interacted when they encountered challenges and uncertainty. Rather than focusing exclusively on performance outcomes, Edmondson examined something she referred to as learning behavior within teams. Learning behaviors include actions such as asking questions, seeking feedback, discussing problems openly, experimenting with new approaches, and acknowledging mistakes. These behaviors allow teams to identify problems, explore solutions, and refine their processes over time more efficiently. But they also require individuals to expose uncertainty, limitations, and errors in front of others. In other words, it involves interpersonal risk. Admitting a mistake means acknowledging that something went wrong. Asking a question reveals that we don't fully understand. And proposing an unconventional idea may invite criticism and disagreement. Within many organizations, these moments carry social consequences. Individuals worry that admitting uncertainty will make them appear less capable in front of their colleagues. Edmondson's research therefore examined how psychological safety influenced the likelihood that these learning behaviors would occur. And one of the most striking findings in her study initially appeared counterintuitive. When Edmondson first analyzed the data, she discovered that higher performing teams appeared to report more errors than lower performing teams. And at first glance, this result seemed puzzling. If these teams were performing better, why would they be making more mistakes? But as Edmundson examined the team dynamics, a different explanation became clear. The higher performing teams were not necessarily making more errors. Instead, they were just more willing to acknowledge them and share them openly. Members of these teams felt comfortable speaking openly about mistakes because they were not afraid of embarrassment or punishment. If a problem occurred, it surfaced quickly and the team could discuss what happened and determine how to prevent it from happening again. In contrast, the teams with lower levels of psychological safety often responded to mistakes very differently. Individuals in these environments concealed their errors or minimized their significance. Rather than raising the problem openly, they attempted to quietly correct them before anybody could notice or draw any attention. Over time, the silence limited the team's ability to learn. Problems were discovered much too late, and patterns went unnoticed. Opportunities for early intervention. Improvement are just missed completely. Edmondson's research reveals that psychological safety changes the way information flows within teams. So when an individual believes that speaking up will not damage their reputation or their relationships, they're more likely to share those observations, questions, and concerns. And those contributions allow the team as a group to examine its work more carefully, identify patterns and potential improvements. This process creates a powerful learning cycle. Problems are identified earlier, teams discuss them openly, processes are adjusted, and performance gradually improves. It's important to note that Edmondson's findings demonstrated that psychological safety does not directly cause high performance. Instead, psychological safety enables learning behaviors that allow the teams to improve performance over time. That's a crucial clarification. In other words, psychological safety functions as kind of the foundation or relational infrastructure for learning. Without it, individuals often protect themselves because they don't want to risk that interpersonal and social risk. This insight supports researchers in thinking about effective teams differently. For many years, organizations focused primarily on assembling groups of just highly capable individuals. While individual talent and expertise certainly matters, Edmondson's research demonstrates that the way those individuals interact with one another is actually quite important. The relational signals people receive within a team, how leaders respond, how colleagues react, how disagreements are handled, shape whether individuals feel comfortable to contribute their thinking to the group. And this is why we have an entire podcast on this concept within the lens of leadership, because it's important. Because the responses leaders give to uncertainty, questions, and mistakes send powerful signals. Over time, these signals determine whether psychological safety develops or whether silence becomes a strategy. Understanding this connection between leadership and psychological safety helps explain why Edmondson's research continues to shape conversations about teamwork, innovation, and organizational learning today. So if psychological safety enables the learning behaviors that Edmondson described, I have an obvious question. What determines whether psychological safety develops within a team in the first place? Edmondson's research made it clear that psychological safety does not just simply appear whenever people work together. And instead, it develops gradually through the patterns of interaction that unfold within a group over time. Through these interactions, individuals begin to form an understanding, often an implicit one, about what kinds of behaviors are acceptable and what kind of behaviors carry social risk. Leaders occupy a unique position within organizational hierarchies. Because they hold authority, their reactions often carry more weight than those of other team members. A single response to a mistake or question can communicate something far beyond the immediate situation. For example, imagine a moment when a team member acknowledges that something went wrong in a project. If the response is immediate criticism or blame from the leader, the message received by the group may be clear. Mistakes are dangerous to admit. Even if the leader does not intend to send the signal, the emotional tone of that interaction becomes part of the social information that that group interprets carefully. In contrast, if a leader responds with curiosity, asking what happened, what can be learned, how the team might prevent the issue in the future, the signal is very different. In that moment, the mistake becomes an opportunity for learning rather than a source of embarrassment. And over time, these responses shape the expectations that those team members carry into future interactions. Researchers studying leadership and psychological safety have increasingly emphasized that these relational signals operate at a very granular level. Psychological safety is not created through a single policy, like an open door policy or a formal statement. Rather, it develops through the accumulation of everyday interactions. Small moments matter. The way a leader responds to uncertainty, the tone when giving feedback, the willingness to allow mistakes to be visible. Each of these behaviors communicates information about the social norms of the team. Recent research has begun to explore these dynamics through a variety of theoretical perspectives. For example, some scholars have examined leadership through the lens of attachment theory, which we touched on in the last episode, which originated in developmental psychology, but has been increasingly applied in organizational contexts. A nd

Secure Base Leadership

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within that framework, leaders can function as what researchers describe as a secure base for team members. And a secure base provides a sense of stability and support that allows individuals to explore new ideas, take risks, and engage with challenges. Research by Dong and colleagues have examined how secure-based leadership behaviors influence employee performance and engagement. And these studies suggest that when leaders demonstrate availability, support, and openness to input, employees feel more confidently in engaging in behaviors that involve that interpersonal risk. So when leaders create environments that feel psychologically safe and secure, individuals become more willing to experiment, ask questions, and share ideas. This connection highlights an important insight that psychological safety is not a cognitive belief about teen norms. It is deeply connected to the emotional tone of the interactions within a group. And these signals influence whether we feel comfortable sharing openly or whether we instinctively protect ourselves by remaining quiet. Within organizational settings, leaders play an important role in shaping those cues. They help establish the emotional boundaries of participation within team dynamics. This dynamic becomes important, especially in complex or uncertain work environments where organizations depend on individuals sharing information quickly and honestly. When psychological safety is present, people are more likely to surface concerns early, allowing teams to respond before those small problems become major failures. When psychological safety is absent, individuals often hesitate to speak up, even when they recognize that something may be wrong and the consequences of this can be significant.

Psychological Safety in High Risk Environments

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Across a wide range of industries, from healthcare to aviation to emergency response, researchers have documented how communication failures and unreported concerns can contribute to catastrophic and organizational errors. These environments highlight just how important psychological safety can be when the stakes are high. So, next we are going to look at what psychological safety looks like in high-risk spaces, where the ability to speak up can have profound implications, not only for team learning, but also for safety and performance. One of the reasons psychological safety has become so widely discussed is that its consequences become very visible in environments where the cost of silence is extremely high. While much of the early research on psychological safety focused on corporate teams and organizational learning, scholars have increasingly examined how these dynamics unfold in professions where communication failures can have immediate and very serious consequences. In these settings, the ability of individuals to speak up, to question decisions, and acknowledge uncertainty can influence organizational learning as well as safety and performance. So we'll be talking about some growing body of research that has explored psychological safety in high-risk professions, such as healthcare, emergency response, and public safety. One example comes from a recent scoping review titled Antecedents of Workplace Psychological Safety in Public Safety in Frontline Healthcare, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In this review, researchers, including Eugene Ip, examined a wide range of studies investigating psychological safety across professions, such as emergency medicine and public safety response teams. The goal of the review was to identify the conditions that make psychological safety more or less likely to develop in environments where individuals must make decisions under pressure and communicate rapidly changing information. Across the studies analyzed in the review, one theme appeared consistently. Individuals operating in high-pressure environments frequently detect potential problems earlier than formal reporting systems can capture them. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. In healthcare settings, for example, frontline clinicians often observe subtle indicators that a patient's condition may be deteriorating before these changes appear clearly in medical data or tests coming back. Similarly, in emergency response environments, individuals on the ground often recognize environmental cues that indicate danger before official reports confirm those risks. These early observations are critical because they allow teams to respond quickly to changing conditions. But whether these observations are shared depends heavily on the relational climate of the team. In hierarchical environments, individuals may hesitate to question decisions made by more senior professionals. A limited license social worker might notice something concerning, but wonder whether raising the issue will be interpreted as overstepping. A member of an emergency response team might hesitate to challenge a plan developed by a more experienced colleague. In these moments, psychological safety plays an important role determining whether information is shared. When psychological safety is high, they are more likely to communicate early warnings. And these early signals allow teams to reconsider assumptions, adjust approach, and respond adequately. When psychological safety is low, individuals might delay speaking up or they might wait for additional evidence, or they might try to fix it themselves, but they've decided that the social risk of questioning authority outweighs the potential benefits of sharing. Research examining search and rescue teams illustrates this dynamic particularly clearly. A mixed methods dissertation study called Psychological Safety and Belonging in High Risk Search and Rescue Teams examined how relational climate influences communication within these teams. Search and rescue operations frequently occur in unpredictable environments where information is incomplete and conditions are changing rapidly. Teams must coordinate closely while making decisions under significant pressure. In this study, the researcher examined both quantitative survey data and qualitative interviews with search and rescue personnel in order to understand how team climate influenced communication patterns during those operations. The findings suggested that team members who reported higher levels of psychological safety and belonging were significantly more likely to speak up when they observed potential concerns or uncertainties. And these individuals were more comfortable sharing observations even when they were not completely certain if their interpretation was correct. This willingness to voice partial or uncertain information proved important for team coordination. In complex environments, no single individual possesses a complete picture of the situation. And instead, situational awareness emerges from the integration of observations contributed by all the team members. When individuals feel comfortable, the team can combine these perspectives to form a more accurate understanding of what is happening. These findings highlight an important feature of psychological safety that sometimes receives less intention. Psychological safety doesn't eliminate uncertainty and instead it just creates an environment where individuals feel able to contribute information, even if that information is not yet complete. More broadly, research across high-risk professions suggests that psychological safety plays a critical role in shaping that flow of information within teams. When psychological safety is present, that information moves freely. When psychological safety is absent, that information becomes restricted. In these environments where stakes are high and the margin for error is small, the ability for individuals to share concerns and observations can quickly influence outcomes. The same time, these dynamics are not limited to professions such as healthcare or emergency response. The same relational mechanisms appear across a wide range of organizational contexts, including environments where teams are learning new skills, receiving feedback, or attempting to improve their performance. In many ways, feedback conversations represent one of the most common situations in which interpersonal risk becomes visible within organizations. Receiving feedback can challenge an individual's sense of competence or professional identity, while offering feedback can create uncertainty about how that message will be received. For this reason, several researchers have examined how psychological safety influences the way feedback specifically is given, received, and integrated into learning processes.

Safe Feedback

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So let's talk about psychological safety and feedback. So feedback is widely recognized as essential for learning and professional development. And the experience of feedback can also feel threatening. Feedback involves discussing mistakes, something very vulnerable about one's performance, and these conversations can activate concerns about professional standing. Researchers studying this in educational and professional learning environments has examined how psychological safety shapes the way individuals engage with feedback opportunities. An important contribution to this conversation comes from a study called Psychological Safety and Feedback. What does it look like and how can educators work with leaders to foster it? In this study, researchers Johnson, Keating, and Molloy explored how psychological safety influences feedback interactions within clinical education environments. The researchers were particularly interested in understanding why feedback conversations sometimes fail to produce meaningful learning, even when individuals have received detailed information about their performance. Through their analysis, Johnson and colleagues observed that feedback is not simply a technical exchange of information. Instead, it is a very relational process that unfolds within social contexts shaped by power dynamics, trust, and perceptions of psychological safety. When individuals feel psychologically safe, they can approach that feedback with curiosity and they set the defensiveness down. They might even ask follow-up questions. They might reflect on their performance. They might consider how they can improve. This doesn't happen when psychological safety is not present. Most of those feedback conversations can trigger protective responses, and that feedback is then viewed as a threat. So instead of engaging with that information, they start to focus on protecting their self-image. Johnson and colleagues emphasize that effective feedback requires more than just accurate information. It also requires an environment where individuals feel like they can engage with that information openly. In their analysis, psychologically safe feedback environments often included several relational characteristics. Educators and supervisors signaled openness to dialogue rather than delivering feedback as a one-way or one-directional judgment. Learners felt able to ask questions, clarify those misunderstandings, and reflect on performance without fear. In this sense, feedback becomes more collaborative, a collaborative learning process rather than a hierarchical evaluation. The importance of leadership behavior in shaping these interactions is also highlighted in research examining how leaders can model that vulnerability within teams. In a study titled Taking Your Team Behind the Curtain: The Effects of Leader Feedback Sharing and Feedback Sharing on Team Psychological Safety, researchers Kudaferris and Grant examined how leaders' willingness to share feedback about their own performance and actively seek input from team members influenced team dynamics. Now, I want to be really careful here. We're not just talking about 360 reviews. We're talking about ongoing and daily behaviors. Traditionally, leadership has often been associated with projecting confidence and authority. And leaders may be feeling pressured to present themselves as those confident and competent decision makers, and that they must possess the answers to any question necessary to guide the team. However, this research suggests that leaders who occasionally reveal their own learning process can actually create important relational signals within teams. When leaders openly share feedback about information they have received or ask team members for their input about their decisions and how things are going, they demonstrate that learning is not limited to lower level members of the organization. Over time, these signals can influence how team members interpret that interpersonal risk that we've been talking about within the group. If a leader is openly asking for feedback on their own performance, team members start to feel more comfortable raising concerns or offering suggestions. The act of seeking feedback communicates that speaking honestly is acceptable and valued within the team. This research highlights an important dimension of psychological safety that extends beyond formal policies or organizational initiatives.

Leaders Model Psychological Safety

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Psychological safety is often constructed through modeling behavior. When leaders demonstrate openness to feedback, acknowledge their own uncertainty, invite contributions from the team, they create Relational signals, it's information that the team uses to interpret the social environment. Taken together, this research suggests that psychological safety is not only about preventing negative consequences for speaking up, but it's also about creating conditions in which curiosity, reflection, collaborative learning become part of those everyday interactions. And because feedback conversations occur so frequently within organizational life, they provide one of the clearest windows into how psychological safety is actually experienced within teams. So let's look at some research that examines leadership behaviors that unintentionally suppress voice and participation. Although much of the research that we've been talking about focuses on conditions that support learning and collaboration, scholars have also looked at the ways that leadership behaviors can undermine these dynamics. And in many organizations, the absence of psychological safety is not the result of a single dramatic event. Instead, it often develops gradually as individuals interpret those patterns of interaction over time. One stream of research examining these dynamics focuses on how certain leadership styles influence employee behavior within teams. A study called Leader Prohibitive Voice shapes employee voice through psychological safety, moderated by self-efficacy and generational differences. Examined how leader communication influences employees' willingness to speak up about concerns. Remember, in a previous episode, we talked about how important employee voice is. So in this study, researchers explored how leaders' responses to employee concerns shape the development of that psychological safety. The term prohibitive voice refers to situations in which employees raise concerns about potential problems or risks within an organization. And these behaviors can be extremely valuable because they allow teams to identify issues before they turn into larger ones. However, as we've stated, it carries tremendous interpersonal risk. The researchers found that leadership responses to those early warnings play an important role in shaping whether employees continue to speak up. And when leaders respond constructively to concerns, treating them as useful pieces of information rather than challenges to authority, employees are more likely to continue voicing observations. And these responses contribute to the development of psychological safety because they continue to signal that raising concerns is accepted and it's a valuable part of organizational life. Researchers found that when the leaders respond dismissively or negatively, suppression happens. This study confirms that psychological safety acts as an important mechanism connecting leadership behavior with that absolutely vital employee voice. Another study called Perceived Leader Narcissism and Counterproductive Work Behavior in the Journal of Psychology of Leaders and Leadership examined how employees respond when they perceive narcissistic tendencies in leadership. So in this research, Schutz et al. explored how employees interpret leadership behaviors that emphasize status, authority, or self-promotion. So they identified this as a narcissistic leadership style and stated that it can create environments in which leaders appear highly confident and assertive, but these same behaviors can also signal that criticism or disagreement may not be welcomed. So when employees perceive that a leader prioritizes maintaining authority or status, they're going to become more cautious about sharing perspectives that challenge existing decisions. So again, in this study, we're linking a negative leadership style to the decreased feelings of psychological safety because status and authority are promoted more than collaboration, openness, and transparency.

Team Learning and Team Efficacy

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So let's talk about what the research finds that helps us understand the mechanisms in which psychological safety influences and supports team outcomes in a positive way. In that article titled How Psychological Safety Affects Team Performance, the mediating role of efficacy and learning behavior, researchers found that psychological safety contributes to improved team performance by supporting two important processes. First, psychological safety increases team learning behavior. So as we discussed this episode, if we feel comfortable asking questions, learning from our mistakes, we can learn as a team. Second, psychological safety strengthens team efficacy, which refers to the collective belief within the team that members can work together effectively to accomplish their goals. Now let's bring that to the nonprofit space. There was research examining psychological safety within nonprofit organizations, and they found similar findings as all of the other previous research we've talked about this episode. This article titled Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Job Performance in Nonprofit Organizations, The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety. Researchers explored how leadership behavior influences employee performance within those nonprofit settings. They examined how ethical leadership practices shape that relational environment. Ethical leadership often involves behaviors such as transparency, fairness, and decision making, as well as openness to dialogue with employees. This study found that psychological safety plays a mediating role in this relationship. So when those leaders demonstrate ethical and transparent behaviors, employees feel psychologically safe. The findings are consistent in this study. This sense of safety encourages employees to contribute ideas, raise concerns, and engage more actively with their work. This increases job performance across the organization over time. So I might be sounding a little bit like a broken record by this point, but it's because all of these different pieces of research essentially have arrived to the same conclusion.

Burnout

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But let's talk about the relationship between psychological safety and employee well-being and burnout. In healthcare environments and nonprofit settings and social work settings, professionals frequently face demanding workloads, emotional stress, and complex decision-making responsibilities. And these pressures can contribute to burnout when individuals feel isolated or unsupported within their team environments. In their article titled Healing Leaders: Altruism and Psychological Safety as Antidotes to Burnout in Healthcare settings, researchers Wang et al. explored how leadership styles that emphasize support, altruism, and relational care influence the development of psychological safety within healthcare teams. And their findings suggest that when leaders demonstrate concern for employee well-being and encourage open communication, psychological safety can function as a protective factor against burnout. Because psychological safety influences that information flow within teams, it influences how individuals feel more comfortable contributing ideas and raising concerns, and it also strengthens collective learning and problem solving capacity. When psychological safety is absent, this narrowing of participation, these unasked questions, these opportunities for improvement left on the table significantly limit a team's ability to innovate and adapt. And these conditions can lead to higher occurrences of burnout.

Conclusion and Recap

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So in today's episode, across all of the research that we have explored, and at risk for me sounding like a broken record, a consistent pattern emerged. Psychological safety influences whether individuals feel able to contribute their ideas, raise concerns, acknowledge uncertainty, and participate fully in the collective learning of a team. And these dynamics are present in many types of organizations, but they take on particular significance in fields where the work itself centers on supporting people. In professions such as social work, nonprofit leadership, healthcare, other human-serving fields, organizations exist not only to produce outcomes or deliver services, but to address complex human needs. These environments often involve uncertainty, emotionally demanding situations, ever-changing funding streams, and decisions that can significantly affect the well-being of individuals and communities. Because of this complexity, the ability of teams to communicate openly and learn from one another becomes especially important. Human-serving organizations frequently operate in conditions where those resources are limited and the challenges that are facing clients are multifaceted. And in these environments, no single individual possesses all of the knowledge required to respond effectively to every situation. Instead, effective practice depends on the collective insight of the team. Psychological safety plays an important role in making that collective insight accessible. Psychological safety therefore supports not only internal team functioning, but also the ethical responsibilities that many helping professions emphasize. Social work, for example, has a long emphasized the importance of reflexivity, critical reflection, and collaborative practice. And these principles encourage professionals to examine their assumptions, consider diverse perspectives, and remain open to learning from both colleagues and the communities they serve. Psychological safety creates the relational conditions that allow these principles to be practiced within organizational lives.

Takeaway and Call to Action

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So the takeaway from today's episode is that psychological safety doesn't happen through policy. It doesn't happen through 360 reviews. And it doesn't happen when leaders elicit feedback every once in a while. It's shaped by leadership and the everyday signals that tell people whether their voice matters and whether it's safe for them to contribute with ideas and uncertainties and be transparent about mistakes. As you move through your work this week, you might reflect on a few simple questions. What signals does your leadership send when someone raises a concern, asks a question, or admits uncertainty? What small leadership behaviors could you practice this week and ongoing that would make it easier for someone on your team to speak honestly? What shifts in your organization are needed to increase psychological safety? Thanks for your thoughtful listen today, and I'll see you next time. And as always, you can check out the meeting notes for all of the references and resources that I used in today's episode. You can also check out the meeting notes for transcripts and any other additional materials.