Why Psychological Safety Is No Longer Optional at Work

Home
Executive Perspectives
Directory
Why Psychological Safety Is No Longer Optional at Work

Topic: Leadership, Human Resources

Format: Article

Published Date: March 2026

Share:
Why Psychological Safety Is No Longer Optional At Work

Psychological safety, defined as the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, has long been recognised as a critical driver of team performance. Yet in most organisations, it remains aspirational rather than operational. As AI reshapes how work is done and decisions are made, the ability to speak honestly, surface difficult truths, and challenge assumptions is no longer a cultural nicety but a strategic necessity. This article examines what psychological safety truly demands of leaders, and why organisations that fail to embed it will find themselves at a growing disadvantage.

We live in an era of heightened focus on employee wellbeing. In a concerted effort to develop an engaged and future-ready talent base, organisations across the world are focusing on upskilling, reskilling, and leadership development. According to Harvard’s latest Global Leadership Development Study, 40% of respondents said their organisations are placing even greater emphasis on building a change-ready organisation. 

But the efforts to create a change-ready workforce don’t seem to be paying off. According to Forbes, job burnout was at 66% in 2025. What are we missing out on? Despite the push to create an engaged workforce, the answer to a critical question continues to elude most leaders: Why do seemingly intelligent, driven, capable employees hesitate to speak up?    

Is it a lack of talent or capability? Of motivation? It’s a lack of psychological safety.  

Coined by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson in 1999, psychological safety is defined as the “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking". This includes asking for help, admitting mistakes, or proposing new ideas without fear of punishment or humiliation.  

In 2026, as organisations move from merely understanding AI to making it a critical part of how they work, having talent that is unafraid to speak honestly, admit mistakes, and, perhaps most importantly, contribute ideas will be a source of competitive advantage.  

From silence to speaking up  

Consider this: leadership is introducing a new strategic initiative that, according to them, will help employees track their tasks more efficiently and effectively. When they open the meeting to questions or concerns from employees, a psychologically unsafe work environment will ensure silence as the only response. No questions, no objections, seemingly quick alignment—until the project eventually fails.   

On the other hand, in a psychologically safe environment, when such a meeting is opened to questions, the challenges and concerns that employees voice may seem chaotic at first. But in the longer run, it is this chaos that helps ensure the right changes are made at the right time and the result is sustainable success, for both the employees and the organisation.  

“If there is one metric that everyone in HR must pursue, it is psychological safety—define it, identify it, measure it, talk about it, champion it, and advance it across the organisation. When you do this, people and human talent flourishes,” says Professor Chandrashekhar Sripada, Clinical Professor (Teaching), Organisational Behaviour, at the Indian School of Business (ISB).   

And research proves it. Google’s Project Aristotle concluded that psychological safety was the most critical and impactful driver of team success. In fact, a comprehensive study in Frontier in Psychology found it to be “the engine of performance”. 

What leadership must focus on  

Senior leadership is uniquely positioned to take the lead as they play a critical role in ensuring that employees feel a real sense of safety and community in the organisation. They can set the ball rolling by ensuring that constructive criticism, asking questions, and intelligent risk-taking are not just explicitly recognised but rather rewarded in performance frameworks and reviews.  

It’s not only the employee side that leadership, such as CHROs, should focus on. In fact, expectation-setting with senior leadership regarding psychological safety is even more critical. Leaders of the future must be equipped with the skills to respond productively to bad news, model vulnerability at the top, and build feedback-rich team cultures. Psychological safety can also be integrated into employee engagement surveys and leadership assessments. 

Research offers insight into how some leaders are successful in instinctively creating a psychologically safe environment for their team while others inadvertently shut them down. In a study, ISB Professor Hemant Kakkar and Jessica J W Paek of Indiana University investigated why leaders differ in how they help their team members and what explains these contrasting instincts. Dominant leaders tend to provide ‘dependency help’, keeping employees reliant on them. But prestige-oriented leaders help employees become self-reliant by providing ‘autonomy help’. 

Leaders motivated by dominance may see dissent as a threat to authority. Those driven by prestige, however, are more likely to invite input, share knowledge, and create environments where others feel safe to contribute. The implication is clear as day: a psychologically safe workplace cannot be created accidentally but must be built intentionally.  

What a psychologically safe environment looks like 

Leaders must understand that creating a work environment where employees are empowered to share their thoughts and ideas, successes and, more importantly, failures is not a “nice to have”, but a strategic imperative that directly affects organisational success. 

Here is a glimpse of such a workplace:  

  1. Leaders invite and reward voice: Leaders in such a workplace do not reward “yes men” but instead keenly listen to dissenting views in order to take decisions that are well-thought out. Saying “I don’t know” or “I want to understand” is not seen as a sign of weakness.  
  2. No blame game around mistakes: When an issue arises, leaders ensure that no finger-pointing ensues. Instead, the right people put their heads together to have focused discussions on the learnings and the way forward.  
  3. Debate is encouraged: A silent meeting room can be a death knell for ideas. In fact, meetings must include debate. Healthy disagreement is normal and an environment where it is encouraged brings to the table different viewpoints and perspectives that may have otherwise been ignored. 
  4. Expectations are clear: It is a myth that creating a psychologically safe work environment lowers performance standards. Accountability remains explicit, and people are responsible for the outcomes of their work. But the focus is on feedback that is timely, candid, and focused on improvement.  
  5. Silence is not the norm: Employees speaking up about, say, rising workload, ethical aspects of organisational decisions, mental wellbeing is the norm. In such a workplace, problems surface much before crises actually happen. Today, organisations just cannot afford to create a culture of silence. And it is future-focused leaders, who intentionally work towards creating a psychologically safe workplace, that will successfully lead their organisations into the future of work. For they won’t just get better ideas, they will also get better decisions, faster learning, and more resilient performance, a true win-win for all stakeholders.