Psychological safety: Actions and benefits in the workplace
Trust and psychological safety have much in common but they are not interchangeable concepts. Dr Sue Shortland explains how these issues differ, the benefits of developing a culture of high psychological safety and the actions required.
24 June 2025
This article is taken from the Summer 2025 issue of
Think Global People magazine
View your copy of the Summer 2025 issue of Think Global People magazine.Trust relations
Trust is central to effective social structures. Trust refers to interactions between a minimum of two individuals or parties: the trustor who grants trust and the trustee who receives or obtains trust. Trust exists in the mind of an individual and pertains to a specific target individual or organisation.Trust creates an expectation between the parties that each will behave in a mutually acceptable way and that neither will exploit the other’s vulnerabilities. For instance, you might trust one colleague but not another. In essence, there is a shared understanding between the parties with respect to professional conduct and related standards. To illustrate trust in an organisation, you might trust a particular company to uphold high standards, while not trusting others to do so.Psychological safety
A key difference between trust and psychological safety is that psychological safety is experienced at a group level. Psychological safety refers to the belief that you will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. People working together tend to have similar perceptions of whether or not the organisational climate is psychologically safe.Positive benefits from creating a culture of psychological safety include putting conflict to good use, leveraging diversity, and helping to overcome geographic dispersion.Psychological safety is about being candid. While this may well result in conflict, this should be productive, not destructive, and so it will enable inclusion of diverse viewpoints. Psychological safety enables different and new ideas to be heard; this can encourage minority groups to speak up.When employees are geographically spread, there is an absence of perceptive cues that are usually gained from direct communication. This means that employees are not directly able to see or hear how their ideas and suggestions are being received. Developing a culture of psychological safety means that people will have confidence that they will not be embarrassed or humiliated if they make a mistake or present something that is not well received.High versus low psychological safety
The impact of a climate of psychological safety on organisational performance and agility depends upon the organisational standards applied to employees. When psychological safety is high and high standards are expected, a culture of learning and high performance can result. If high standards are not necessarily expected, high psychological safety generates a comfortable zone for employees – although this does not necessarily result in them stretching themselves to help contribute to greater organisational agility.If organisations have low psychological safety but demand high standards, this will create anxiety for employees. A combination of low psychological safety and low standards is likely to generate apathy.Benefits of psychological safety
Where there is a climate of high psychological safety individuals will feel comfortable even when making mistakes and can learn from these. People will openly share ideas and this can result in better innovation, decision-making, organisational performance and agility.By contrast, where there is a climate of psychological danger, people will fear making mistakes. A blame culture will result and so people are less likely to share views and ideas. This can result in a “common knowledge effect” whereby there is a tendency to defer to information or decisions held by the majority of the group.The CIPD has defined organisational agility as the “ability to stay open to new directions and be continually proactive, helping to assess the limits or indeed risks of existing approaches and ensuring that leaders and followers have an agile and change-ready mind-set to enable them, and ultimately the organisation, to keep moving, changing, adapting”.It is clear that if organisations are to be change-ready and adaptable, a climate of psychological safety, alongside high trust relationships, is valuable.Read related articles
- Talent selection and development as levers for organisational change
- Global mobility professionals: Improving productivity and wellbeing
- Serendipity in careers and lifelong learning
- Resolving the most difficult workplace conversations
How to create psychological safety
The behaviours required for a climate of psychological safety include: co-operation; knowledge sharing; inclusivity; helpfulness; mutual respect; and experimentation and creativity.To encourage these behaviours, organisations’ leaders and managers must foster empathy, a fair and inclusive environment, a learning culture, a growth mind-set, and empowerment. Workplace practices must embrace delegated decision-making, participation, autonomy, and supportive leadership. Underpinning these is an appropriate organisational structure.The role of line managers
At the recent Westminster Employment Forum policy conference: Next Steps for Women in the Workplace, Dr Meenakshi Krishnan, principal research fellow at the Institute of Employment Studies, highlighted the role of line managers in creating a culture of psychological safety, particularly in respect of widening the participation of minorities.Dr Krishnan noted that line managers are often the gatekeepers to the kind of support that minorities often feel they do not get. To create psychological safety, line managers may need to be flexible in their demands. If they have very rigid ideas about what the ideal worker, productivity and cost efficiency look like, then creating an inclusive workplace will be problematic.Leaders and managers need the skills to have difficult conversations in the workplace, engage with diversity dilemmas and be flexible around what kind of workplace adjustments might be needed by different people. Dr Krishnan pointed out that this is not just a question of HR policy; organisations must move beyond policy to ensuring that there are everyday practices of inclusion that really matter. Line managers lie at the heart of this.Supporting organisational change
To support an organisation’s capacity to change, leadership and management must review their attitudes to conflict, criticism, sharing information, and experimentation. They must also consider their degree of willingness to give people autonomy and support for their actions, their openness to new ideas (especially from below), their willingness to discuss sensitive issues openly, and the degree to which the organisational structure and culture facilities change.All of these issues must be underpinned by a positive climate of high trust and psychological safety if organisations are to increase their agility in today’s dynamic global world.
Find out more about the Think Global People and Think Women community and events.
Subscribe to Relocate Extra, our monthly newsletter, to get all the latest international assignments and global mobility news.Relocate’s new Global Mobility Toolkit provides free information, practical advice and support for HR, global mobility managers and global teams operating overseas.
©2025 Re:locate magazine, published by Profile Locations, Spray Hill, Hastings Road, Lamberhurst, Kent TN3 8JB. All rights reserved. This publication (or any part thereof) may not be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of Profile Locations. Profile Locations accepts no liability for the accuracy of the contents or any opinions expressed herein.
