Team Psychological Safety
Edmondson, A. C. · 1999
也被称为: Psychological Safety
Team psychological safety is the shared belief among members of a team that the group is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — that speaking up with a question, a concern, a mistake or a dissenting idea will not lead to embarrassment, rejection or punishment. Two features of the definition are frequently lost in popular use. It is a group-level property, a shared perception belonging to the team rather than a trait of individuals. And it concerns interpersonal risk, not comfort or the absence of pressure: psychologically safe teams often have high performance standards, and the combination is what produces learning.
Theory that teams differ in the shared belief that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking — admitting error, asking for help, disagreeing, proposing unfinished ideas — and that this belief, more than talent or resources, governs whether a team learns. Psychological safety is a team-level climate, not an individual trait.
- 来源:
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
- DOI:
- 10.2307/2666999
参加基于此理论的经过验证的测试
阅读关於某个构念的资料能让您了解它是什麼,而经验证的测验工具则能让您了解自己在其中的位置。免费作答,幾分鐘內即可獲得结果。
证据概览
- 实证支持
- 强证据支持
- 重复验证
- 已充分重复验证
- 跨文化性
- 大致具普遍性
- 綜合分析(统合分析)
- 已收录 10 项
这些评等总结了关於该理論已发表的文獻,而非以此理論建构的任何单一测验的品质。它们是根据下方所列来源所作的編輯判斷,並會隨著证据累积而變化。
历史背景
Schein and Bennis used the term in the 1960s in the context of organizational change. Edmondson gave it its modern operational form in her 1999 Administrative Science Quarterly paper, which grew out of a counterintuitive finding in hospital data: better-performing nursing units reported more medication errors, not fewer, because they were reporting them rather than committing more. The construct spread far beyond academia after Google's Project Aristotle identified it in 2016 as the strongest differentiator among effective teams, a result that also accelerated its dilution in popular management use.
构念
Team Psychological Safety
The shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking — admitting a mistake, asking for help, disagreeing out loud, proposing unfinished ideas (Edmondson, 1999). It is a property of the team climate rather than an individual trait, and is theorized as distinct from team cohesiveness and from trust in specific individuals. Where safety is high, information moves fast and problems surface while they are small; where it is low, the taxed behaviors are minimized and errors go unreported rather than unmade.
工具
- NOESIS Team Psychological Safety ScaleNOESIS2026
基于此理论的测试
实际应用
Psychological safety predicts team learning behaviour, error reporting, innovation and, in healthcare, patient safety outcomes. It moderates the relationship between team diversity and performance, which is one reason diversity initiatives without it underdeliver. In practice it is treated as a leadership-influenced condition: leader inclusiveness, framing work as a learning problem, and explicit invitation to dissent are the interventions with the best evidential support. Measured for a real team, it functions as a diagnostic of whether the team can surface bad news early.
如何测量
Measured with a short self-report Likert scale (Edmondson's seven items) administered to team members and aggregated to the team, with within-group agreement reported to justify aggregation.
批评与局限
The construct is defined at the team level but overwhelmingly measured by aggregating individual self-reports, and agreement within teams is often too low to justify the aggregation — which means many published team-level findings rest on shaky measurement foundations. Cross-sectional designs with same-source measurement dominate, so causal claims outrun the evidence. Its popular reception has broadened it into a synonym for a pleasant workplace, dropping both the interpersonal-risk specificity and the high-standards half of Edmondson's framework. Cross-cultural work is thinner than the construct's global use implies, particularly regarding power distance.
重要文献
- Edmondson, A. C.. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. 10.2307/2666999
- Edmondson, A. C. & Lei, Z.. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091305
- Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A. & Vracheva, V.. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. 10.1111/peps.12183