Back to: Psychological Safety
Some useful background
You might never have used the expression ‘Psychological Safety’ before now, but we’re pretty certain you can identify times you’ve felt it, and times you haven’t. To add some background to your experience this short section looks at some recent history of the idea.
How did we get here?
Work began with Schein and Bennis in the 1960s, continued with W.E. Deming through to the 1980s, and was further consolidated by William Kahn in the 1990s. Between them, this laid a solid foundation for the concept. While there were various formulations of the idea, the core elements have been stable for many years.
More latterly, Amy Edmondson has been responsible for codifying its key elements into team psychological safety, leading to significant growth in research. Interest in the concept has grown strongly since the early aughts.
Edmondson’s seminal article, published in 1999, set the scene for Psychological Safety as a performance concept in developing a learning organisation.
In 2008, Abraham Carmeli, Daphna Brueller, and Jane E Dutton added yet more weight with their research, which clearly showed the importance of Psychological Safety in learning.
The third key article is a 2014 piece authored by Amy Edmondson and Zhike Lee, Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct. This is a longer read of about 25 pages but is valuable material. You can download and read the pdf below.
Unexpectedly, it was at Google that the concept gained real momentum and publicity.
Project Aristotle was Google’s effort to determine how to create the perfect team. Given their ability to capture data and extract information from it, Google determined five elements for success. Chief among them was Psychological Safety, along with dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.
For more on Project Aristotle and how Google went about it, have a look at Julia Rozovsky who led the work.
For a longer read, here’s a good article by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times magazine. It’s summarised in the 2m23s video below.