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How To Measure Psychological Safety At Work

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Psychological safety is the foundation of a healthy workplace culture. 

When employees feel psychologically safe, they experience a team where they feel able to share ideas, mistakes and concerns. When a team is truly psychologically safe, members of the team can experience increased motivation and engagement; leading to improved workplace productivity and less turnover. 

Psychological safety, as a concept with this name, came into existence during Dr. Amy Edmondson’s early research work. We now understand psychological safety to be multifaceted and accurately assessing it may involve a multifaceted approach. 

We suggest that a great starting point is understanding a general profile of a team, through a psychometric assessment.

What Is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety can be defined as a team belief of being able to share ideas, take interpersonal risks, and experiment without feeling apprehensive or fearful of embarrassment or punishment. (REF) 

In a psychologically safe workplace, employees are better able to make decisions, effectively learn, and professionally grow. A lack of psychological safety in the workplace could be observed as:

  • Reduced support seeking during times of workplace stress or need.
  • Limited opinion sharing and discussion about individual perspectives.
  • Team avoidance of difficult situations or topics.
  • A lack of questions during meetings.
  • Blame passing due to fear of owning up to mistakes.
  • Management or leaders taking control of meetings and limiting discussion.
  • Workplace relationships existing entirely on a professional level without personal interactions.

Organizations that function without a culture of psychological safety risk employee burnout, reduced productivity, and increased staff turnover. 

Why Is It Important to Psychological Safety?

Measuring psychological safety in the workplace is important as it gives organizations an insight into the pulse of their teams. Research shows that psychological safety underpins team performance, so if you can measure psychological safety, you’re already learning about the foundations of how your team performs.

In a nutshell, it’s important to measure psychological safety because it leads to:

  • Increased feelings of freedom to create and share ideas.
  • Reduced amounts of workplace mistakes and the chance to learn from errors.
  • Improved creativity.
  • Less employee burnout and staff turnover.
  • Better reputation and attractability to prospective clients and employees.
  • Adaptability in the workplace and quicker delivery time.
  • Greater team and individual resilience.
  • Feelings of inclusivity and team identity.
  • Willingness to take intelligent risks for increased success.

Amy Edmondson’s Psychological Safety Scale

The Psychological Safety Scale (1999) was developed by Dr Amy Edmondson to measure how safe individuals feel taking risks, sharing ideas, raising concerns, and admitting mistakes in an organization without fear or embarrassment or judgment. 

The measure has been effectively applied across a variety of organizations, from healthcare to businesses, to help increase understanding of a workplace culture and how it impacts individual and group well-being and performance. 

Essentially, the core function of The Psychological Safety Scale is to assess whether employees see their work team as unified, and as a group in which communication, learning, and feedback are encouraged.

Who is Dr.Amy Edmondson?

Dr. Amy Edmonson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, where she has been a faculty member since 1996. Best known for her research into psychological safety, she has demonstrated that the concept is crucial for promoting high performing teams who are willing to take risks, share ideas, and collaborate effectively. 

Alongside creating The Psychological Safety Scale, Edmondson has written a range of books which highlight the importance of psychological safety in organizations, including The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (2018), which has been translated into 15 languages, as well as her most recent release Right Kind Of Wrong: How The Best Teams Use Failure To Succeed (2024). We encourage you to read both.

Example Items on The Psychological Safety Scale:

  1. “If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.” (Reverse scored)
  2. “Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.”
  3. “People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.” (Reverse scored)
  4. “No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines another’s efforts.”
  5. “It is safe to take a risk on this team.”
  6. “It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.” (Reverse scored)
  7. “Team members are able to discuss their mistakes.”
  8. “The team is a safe environment for learning.”

Measure Psychological Safety At Work With MindOnly

In our Attachment At Work assessment, MindOnly employs The Psychological Safety Scale alongside other important components of business culture and performance, including team identification, team-member exchange, team perceived virtuality. 

In this way, MindOnly helps provide leaders with an insight into their team’s workplace profile; across team dynamics, attachment and well-being. Also included in the team version, the assessment measures employee self-esteem, emotion regulation, resilience, and burnout, all constructs which relate and contribute to feelings of psychological safety. 

Conclusion: How To Measure Psychological Safety At Work

Psychological safety is the shared belief of a team being a safe environment in which sharing ideas, collaborating, and taking intelligent risks is encouraged rather than judged or punished. When you measure psychological safety, you measure the very thing that underpins how your teams are performing. 

The validated self-report measure included in our assessment, The Psychological Safety Scale, offers an excellent starting point for understanding your team on a deeper level. 

[1] Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

[2] Edmondson, A. C., Kramer, R. M., & Cook, K. S. (2004). Psychological safety, trust, and learning in organizations: A group-level lens. Trust and distrust in organizations: Dilemmas and approaches, 12(2004), 239-272.

[3] Hoshina, Y., Shikino, K., Yamauchi, Y., Yanagita, Y., Yokokawa, D., Tsukamoto, T., Noda, K., Uehara, T., & Ikusaka, M. (2021). Does a learner-centered approach using teleconference improve medical students’ psychological safety and self-explanation in clinical reasoning conferences? A crossover study. PLoS ONE, 16(7).