Psychological Safety in the Workplace Is Critical

The concept of psychological safety in the workplace was first identified by organisational behavioural scientist, Amy Edmondson in 1999 in her paper entitled: ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’. Her research found that companies with a trusting workplace performed better.

Feeling safe, secure and being able to work without the fear of negative consequences, even when you make a mistake, relies on feeling psychologically safe. It means people are comfortable being themselves. In psychologically safe workplaces, diversity is respected and personal risk-taking is encouraged. Above all, team members respect each other and feel accepted. The feeling is like taking a leap and knowing you’ll be caught.

Humiliation, blame, criticism and bullying create workplaces where employees are filled with fear. This kind of psychologically unsafe environment doesn’t get the best out of people. Workers are too busy watching their own backs and frightened of putting a foot wrong to make suggestions and help each other out. They dare not share ideas for fear of being shut down.

When we experience a lack of trust, respect or conflict we feel stressed. When we feel stressed our brain triggers hormones to support a fight-or-flight response. Continually being in that state is bad for our health. This state also has a negative impact on our ability to think strategically. It stifles creativity and teamwork, and that isn’t good for business.

A psychologically safe workplace is the opposite. In an environment where people are encouraged to understand each other’s points of view, understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, support each other, and feel confident to make suggestions and offer ideas, teams flourish. Mistakes (essential for innovation) are made, chewed over and learned from.

In 2019, icare and R U OK? launched a world-first study into psychological safety in the workplace, which showed that frontline lower income-earning staff feel less safe and permitted to take risks at work than higher income-earning employees.

The Australian Workplace Psychological Safety Survey canvassed 1,176 Australian employees and found that only 23 per cent of lower income-earning frontline employees felt their workplace was “psychologically safe” to take a risk, compared to 45 per cent of workers on significantly higher incomes.

A “psychologically safe” workplace is characterised by a climate of interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people feel comfortable being themselves to make mistakes or take risks in their work.

Dr Victor Sojo researches workplace abuse at the University of Melbourne. He was recently interview on Radio National.

“So imagine a situation where we are talking about bonuses, and the difference between not getting a bonus or getting one is having the down payment for your house. If you are in a hyper-competitive environment and the rewards that you would get if you win are disproportionately larger relative to your performance or that of others, you will more likely engage in some form of unfair competition, and that could be in the form of either using other people as a way to get them out of your way."

Dr Soto also argues that:

“And we know power disparity could be a massive factor here. So in organisations where your supervisor has a lot of power disproportionate to yours, and by 'power' we mean not only access to resources but the capacity to make arbitrary decisions without having to explain themselves that could have a large impact on your career. 

In those situations where there is a lot of power disparity, you will also find that bullying could flourish and be very difficult for people to call it out, to do anything about it.”

Conversely, in work environments that are on the opposite end where the organisational hierarchy is not that tall, where people are more flat and people are used to treating each other as equals, in those environments people probably are less concerned with their status and with competing for disproportionate rewards. This, bullying in a structural way, in terms of how things have been designed, is less likely to occur.

A focus on job clarity. When people aren't sure who is responsible for certain tasks, can also contribute to increased workplace bullying and lack of psychological safety.

Putting people in a situation where there will be a lot of friction between differing employees, or where people's resources to cope with difficult situations are being depleted.

Focus on culture. People who are put in very difficult situations do struggle to resist the urge to engage in negative behaviour. It's not that it's impossible, of course it's perfectly possible for people to do that, but in the right situation, even unwittingly people might engage in bullying behaviour and decrease psychological safety. A focus on setting the right culture, that is less passive aggressive and defensive and that rewards people having a go and aren’t punished for making mistakes.

Select the right people. Organisational factors are just one part of the equation; personality plays a role in whether a person is inclined to bully too. 

People often talk about the psychopaths or the narcissists in organisations. However, their prevalence (1% of the population) wouldn't explain the rate of bullying that are observed in workplaces.

There are two other personality traits that we know are related to bullying. One of them is low conscientiousness, and high neuroticism. 

Low conscientiousness has to do with people who are disorganised, who cannot plan properly, who struggle to set clear goals for themselves and other people and to follow rules. And people who are high neuroticism are those who are more likely to experience negative affect and negative emotions and also who are emotionally unstable, so they could have mood swings.