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Management & Leadership vocabulary · Leadership Styles and Skills

Psychological safety

Meaning in management & leadership, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In management & leadership, psychological safety means: A shared belief within a team that people can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes or disagree without being punished or embarrassed.

In Turkish: psikolojik güvenlik, psikolojik güven ortamı

How it is used

Closely linked to Harvard professor Amy Edmondson's research on teams, the term became widely known after Google's study of effective teams, Project Aristotle. Leaders try to build or create psychological safety.

Example sentences

  1. Without psychological safety, junior staff won't tell you when something is going wrong.

  2. She builds psychological safety by thanking people who point out problems.

Common collocations

  • build psychological safety
  • create psychological safety
  • a culture of psychological safety
  • lack of psychological safety
  • feedbackComments on how well someone has done a piece of work or behaved, given so that they can keep doing what works and improve what does not.
  • employee engagementHow committed, involved and enthusiastic employees feel about their work and their organisation, which affects how much effort they put in and whether they stay.
  • conflict resolutionThe process of dealing with a disagreement between people or groups in a fair and calm way, so that they can find a solution and keep working together.
  • emotional intelligenceThe ability to notice, understand and manage your own emotions, and to recognise and respond well to the emotions of other people.
  • empowerTo give people the authority, confidence and resources to make decisions and act on their own, instead of waiting for approval at every step.

More terms: Leadership Styles and Skills

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