How Psychological Safety Drives High Performance

Psychological safety is often misunderstood. It is not about being comfortable, avoiding challenge, or lowering standards, which are often viewed as add-ons or ‘nice to have’.  In simple terms, it refers to a shared belief that people can speak up, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and admit mistakes without fear of humiliation, punishment, or exclusion (Edmondson, 1999).

Decades of research show that this belief is essential for learning, performance, and effective decision-making (Frazier et al., 2016). However, psychological safety is often discussed as if it were limited to individual behaviour or team dynamics. This framing misses a critical truth: Psychological safety is organisational infrastructure. Its presence or absence is a result of systemic design, rather than a collection of random individual interactions.

What is Systemic Design?

Systemic design is the intentional practice of shaping an organisation’s ‘blueprint’, its rules, roles, and physical or digital spaces to encourage specific behaviours. Think of it like urban planning: if a city is designed with well-lit streets and clear crossings, people move safely and confidently. In a workplace, systemic design ensures that “speaking up” is a built-in feature of the environment, rather than a brave act required by an individual.

Psychological Safety as “Organisational Infrastructure“

By organisational infrastructure, we mean the underlying conditions that enable an organisation to function. This includes:

• Formal Systems: Policies, decision-making processes, and accountability and feedback mechanisms.
• Informal Elements: Leadership norms, organisational culture, power relations, and what is implicitly rewarded or punished.

Like physical infrastructure, these foundations are often invisible when they work well yet are extremely disruptive when they fail (Higgins et al., 2022). They determine whether people can do their jobs effectively and whether organisations can function, particularly under pressure or uncertainty.

Supporting Learning and Decision Quality

Research consistently shows that organisations learn best when people feel able to surface problems, share incomplete information, and reflect openly on mistakes (Edmondson, 2003). Where the organisational infrastructure impedes this, learning is constrained, errors are hidden, and feedback is filtered.

High-quality decisions depend on access to diverse perspectives and the ability to challenge dominant views. When people fear negative consequences for dissent, groupthink becomes more likely (Wax et al., 2024). Psychological safety operates as a decision-making infrastructure, influencing not just how decisions are made, but which options are even considered.

The Intersectionality of Risk

Importantly, this infrastructure does not affect everyone in the same way. Evidence shows that speaking up carries greater interpersonal and career risk for people who are marginalised by gender, race, disability, class, or organisational status (Atewologun, 2018). What feels like a “safe” environment to those with high social capital may actually be a high-risk environment for others.

The Structural Gap: What feels safe to those with power and social capital may not feel safe to those without it.

Treating psychological safety as infrastructure requires recognising these asymmetries. Effective systemic design recognises that ‘one-size-fits-all’ policies often overlook the diverse risks faced by marginalised employees. Organisations need to shift from simply promoting inclusion to adopting a systemic design that actively addresses identity-based risks.

At Blueprint for All, we advocate for designing systems that do not rely on “individual bravery” to compensate for structural risk. Instead, we must build environments that are identity-sensitive and structurally inclusive, that not only focus on the individual, but on the organisation as a whole.

Moving Toward Systemic Design

Truly sustainable psychological safety requires systemic design: a deliberate approach to shaping the structures that dictate how information flows. Focusing solely on individual and team-level behaviours is not enough. Interactions are nestled within wider organisational signals: how do leaders respond to bad news, whose voices are amplified, and whether challenge leads to learning or blame (Amoadu et al., 2025).

When psychological safety is framed as infrastructure, responsibility shifts from the individual and team to the organisation as a whole. It invites leaders to ask not whether people “feel safe”, but what has been built to make speaking up possible, normalised, safe and worthwhile.

Join the Conversation: Quarterly Webinar for Partners & Funders

As we begin this series on psychological safety, we invite our valued partners and funders to explore these systemic challenges in greater depth.

We are hosting a free, exclusive webinar designed specifically for our supporters. This session will explore how to transition from “cultural values” to “deliberate design,” ensuring your organisational infrastructure supports risk management and high performance.

• Topic: Psychological Safety as Organisational Infrastructure
• Who: Partners and Funders of Blueprint for All

Email: hello@blueprintforall.org to sign up for our webinars and monthly blogs

References

Amoadu, M., Agyare, D. F., Doe, P. F., & Abraham, S. A. (2025). Examining the impact of psychosocial safety climate on working conditions, well-being and safety of healthcare providers: A scoping review. BMC Health Services Research, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-025-12254-2

Atewologun, D. (2018). Intersectionality theory and practice. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Business and Management. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190224851.013.48

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Edmondson, A. C. (2003). Managing the risk of learning: Psychological safety in work teams. International Handbook of Organisational Teamwork and Cooperative Working, 255–275. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470696712.ch13

Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2016). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

Higgins, M. C., Dobrow, S. R., Weiner, J. M., & Liu, H. (2022). When is psychological safety helpful in organisations? A longitudinal study. Academy of Management Discoveries, 8(1), 77–102. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2018.0242

Wax, A., Asencio, R., Bentley, J. R., & Warren, C. (2024). Safety first! Psychological safety as a driver of learning in functionally diverse, self-assembled teams. Team Performance Management: An International Journal, 30(7/8), 173–194. https://doi.org/10.1108/tpm-02-2024-0017