Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.¶
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
Cited by¶
7 citations across 7 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Antifragility
- Organizational learning (non-obvious): Teams that run frequent small failures and blameless post-mortems convert disorder into accumulated capability, while error-suppressing organizations grow brittle; the hidden cost of stability is that suppressed small failures aggregate into rare catastrophic ones.
This sourceShows team psychological safety enables learning behavior — surfacing, discussing, and learning from errors rather than suppressing them; supports marker 071 (error-discussing teams accumulate capability while error-suppressing ones grow brittle). The empirical core (learning-from-errors vs suppression) is Edmondson's; the antifragility framing is the prime's gloss but is consistent with it.
- Organizational learning (non-obvious): Teams that run frequent small failures and blameless post-mortems convert disorder into accumulated capability, while error-suppressing organizations grow brittle; the hidden cost of stability is that suppressed small failures aggregate into rare catastrophic ones.
- Echo Chamber
- The interventions share form across domains even where their implementation differs. Audit the input filter — measure source diversity at the boundary, not just within, via network analyses, cross-citation measures, or supplier diversity in advisor pools. Reduce dissent cost — psychological safety, anonymous channels, designated devil's advocates, structured pre-mortems, red teams.
This sourceEstablishes psychological safety as the condition under which dissent can be voiced, lowering the in-group cost of disagreement.
- The interventions share form across domains even where their implementation differs. Audit the input filter — measure source diversity at the boundary, not just within, via network analyses, cross-citation measures, or supplier diversity in advisor pools. Reduce dissent cost — psychological safety, anonymous channels, designated devil's advocates, structured pre-mortems, red teams.
- Epistemic Humility
- She acknowledges the limits of her own knowledge, treats disagreement as information, and structures experimentation to reduce uncertainty—the team-learning dynamic Edmondson (1999) shows is enabled by psychological safety.
This sourceIntroduces team psychological safety (shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking) and shows it enables learning behavior. SUPPORTS marker 224 (team-learning dynamic enabled by psychological safety).
- She acknowledges the limits of her own knowledge, treats disagreement as information, and structures experimentation to reduce uncertainty—the team-learning dynamic Edmondson (1999) shows is enabled by psychological safety.
- Organizational Culture
- Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
- Psychological Safety
Mechanisms¶
- Calibration Conversation
- It depends on — and builds — psychological safety, the shared sense that being candid about a gap won't be punished, which is the precondition for honest self-report in the first place.
This sourceDefines team psychological safety as a shared belief that speaking up and taking interpersonal risks will not bring embarrassment, rejection, or punishment.
- It depends on — and builds — psychological safety, the shared sense that being candid about a gap won't be punished, which is the precondition for honest self-report in the first place.
- Cooperation Retrospective
- Without psychological safety
This sourceFinds that team psychological safety supports learning behavior and open discussion of errors that might otherwise remain hidden.
- Without psychological safety
Verification¶
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