![\"Two-branch](\"/article-assets/sicurezza-psicologica/sicurezza-psicologica-due-cause-due-rimedi.jpg\")
The difference isn't one of character, it's organizational, and it leads to two different remedies.
\nPsychological safety is the shared belief that the team is a safe place for interpersonal risk-taking: asking for help, admitting a mistake, raising a problem without fearing you'll look incompetent [1].
\nThe issue concerns the professional with two team members, the department manager who is the first to receive information, and the leader of a company with a hundred employees.
\nIn Italy, 80.9% of companies with at least three employees are controlled by an individual or a family, and in most cases management stays with the business owner or a family member [4].
\nWhere one person decides, their reaction to the first report becomes the rule for the whole company.
\n\n\nPsychological safety is not a pleasant atmosphere: it is the shared belief that bringing up a problem pays off more than keeping it to yourself. As long as the problem is a landmine, silence is the reasonable choice for the people doing the work.
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This article defines the concept and its boundaries, lists the signs of its absence, distinguishes the two reasons for silence and describes what leaders do so that problems reach them.
\nIs a team where people enjoy discussing things the same as a team where people say the uncomfortable things?
\nThey are two different things, and the second has a precise name in the organizational literature, where psychological safety is defined as a belief shared by the members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking [1].
\nThose who take these risks fear looking incompetent or inadequate, and the fear concerns the image left in the eyes of those who decide on roles and promotions [1].
\nThe belief is mostly tacit: it's taken for granted, like the other unwritten rules about \"how things are done here\" [1].
\nThe instrument used to measure the concept includes statements such as \"if you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you\" and \"members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues\" [1].
\nIt should be distinguished from three terms it is confused with: it doesn't coincide with trust between two people, which psychological safety includes but goes beyond, because it describes the climate of a team and not a one-to-one relationship [1].
\nIt doesn't coincide with cohesion, which can actually reduce the willingness to disagree and to challenge other people's ideas [1].
\nIt doesn't coincide with the whistleblowing channel required by law, which concerns violations of legal provisions and leaves out matters related to one's own employment relationship [5].
\nFinally, it doesn't mean permissiveness or constant agreement: it means that a reasoned criticism doesn't cost you your place on the team [1].
\nIs a company without reports a company without problems, or a company that doesn't hear them?
\nThe signs that distinguish the two cases can be observed without internal investigations, and they concern where bad news comes from and what happens to it.
\nBad news comes in from outside. The client reports the defect, the supplier flags the delay: the information existed inside the company earlier, and it took the long way around.
\nProblems are worked around instead of reported. In a field study in nine US hospitals — 239 hours of observation of 26 nurses — in 93% of the problems observed, frontline staff applied a workaround to keep the work going, without informing those who could have fixed the process [3].
\nIn a department the same dynamic takes the form of the missing part you go and take from the next line over, or the personal spreadsheet that patches a faulty step in the management system.
\nObjections come after the meeting. In the hallway or in the group chat, the decision gets the comments that were absent in the room.
\nReports come from one person only. People who raise issues risk labels like \"the complainer\" or \"the troublemaker,\" and the fear of getting them is the most frequently cited reason for staying silent [2].
\nThe report has no visible follow-up. In the interviews of the study on organizational silence — 40 interviewees in the United States, a small sample — 20% believed their managers would not follow up on any issue raised [2].
\nA single sign proves little: it's the combination of three or four that indicates where information stops.
\nFor the specific skill of noticing problems, see problem finding in the workplace.
\nHas the person who doesn't report a problem decided not to say it, or did they not see it?
\n\n\nAs long as bringing up a problem is a landmine that can explode in the hands of whoever picks it up, silence remains the reasonable choice for the people doing the work: psychological safety begins when speaking up pays off more than keeping quiet.
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The two reasons look alike in their effect and are opposite in their remedy, and confusing them leads to treating the wrong person.
\nThe first is the payoff of keeping quiet, often not conscious. In the study cited, 85% of the sample — 34 out of 40 interviewees — said they had found themselves at least once unable to raise with their manager an issue they considered important [2].
\nThe most frequent reasons for silence, again among the 40 interviewees, were fear of being labeled or viewed negatively (30%, that is 12 people), fear of damaging work relationships they depend on to do their job (27.5%), and fear of retaliation affecting their position or promotion (22.5%) [2].
\nThe advantage of keeping quiet is immediate: your image stays intact, the relationship with the colleague or manager doesn't crack, the day ends on time.
\nThere's also a more rewarding version of the same mechanism: among the nurses interviewed in the hospital study, seven out of nine reported satisfaction when they managed to work around an obstacle and keep the work going on their own — a count from nine interviews, not a generalizable proportion [3].
\nPeople who solve things in silence feel competent, and the company mistakes for efficiency a problem that stays right where it is.
\nThe second reason is that the problem isn't seen as one. An anomaly that has been repeating for months becomes the way the work is done, and what is habitual stops looking fixable.
\nHere there's no fear to remove but a skill to build: which gap matters, against which reference, and who needs to be told.
\nThe remedy is different for each: the first requires changing the consequences for whoever speaks up, the second requires teaching people to recognize a gap.
\nHow much does one person's reaction weigh on what the team will say next time?
\nEnough to make two units of the same hospital diverge: in one team, mistakes were reported to the manager as a matter of course; in another, those who had made one said they felt \"put on trial\" [1].
\nIn the study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, the presence of a leader who coaches the team closely is associated with higher levels of psychological safety, which in turn is associated with learning behaviors [1].
\nThat presence is described in concrete terms: the leader calls moments to discuss the work, stays available when there's a problem to talk through, and is approachable as a matter of routine, not by exception [1].
\nFour gestures play out in the first thirty seconds after a report.
\nThank before you evaluate. The credit is for having spoken up, and it's acknowledged before knowing whether the issue raised is well-founded.
\nSeparate the problem from the blame. The first question concerns what made the event possible, not who did it: talking about problems is less risky than talking about mistakes, and the problem is also what the people doing the work can act on [3].
\nAsk about the facts. When it happened, how many times, what changed beforehand: questions that add information without questioning the good faith of the person speaking.
\nState the follow-up. Whoever receives the report says what they will do with it and by when, even when the answer is that for now it's on hold.
\n![\"Sequence](\"/article-assets/sicurezza-psicologica/sicurezza-psicologica-quattro-gesti.jpg\")
The fifth gesture is slower and concerns the leader: admitting your own mistakes in front of the team makes the same thing doable for others [1].
\nThe form of the conversation that follows is covered under feedback to team members.
\nWhat has to change for a team member to see a problem as an opportunity instead of a risk?
\nStatements don't do much: as long as the personal balance sheet of whoever speaks up stays in the red, the invitation to \"speak your mind\" remains just that.
\nThe first change is closing the loop. Whoever reported is told what happened to their report, even when the decision was not to act: without that, the reasonable conclusion is that speaking up is pointless [2].
\nClosing the loop requires a place where the report stays written down and traceable, and that is the function of the problem log, which records who reported, what happened and where things stand.
\nThe second is the criterion. A useful report describes a fact, with a time and a frequency, not a person: the criterion makes a contribution distinguishable from a complaint and protects whoever speaks up from the label [2].
\nThe third is normalcy. The question goes into a moment that already exists — the shift handover, the Monday meeting, the walk through the department — in the form \"what slowed down the work this week\": a recurring question is worth more than a declared open door.
\nThe fourth is teaching people to see. A report told to the team in full, from the fact noticed to the corrected condition, shows what counts as a problem better than any definition.
\nIn a family business the step is more delicate than elsewhere: the team member with twenty years of seniority who raises an issue is questioning a practice introduced by the business owner or a family member, and what's at stake isn't technical but relational.
\nInvolvement remains an underused lever, after all: among small Italian companies, 13.9% say they are willing to offer greater involvement in company decisions as a practice to attract or retain qualified staff [4].
\nThose who adopt it are also working on the levers that keep people in the company, described in the article on employee motivation.
\nThe mistakes that follow share one effect: they shift the cost of the problem onto whoever brings it up.
\nRequiring the problem to come with a solution already attached. The rule seems reasonable and shuts out those who see the anomaly but don't have the tools to solve it, which often means those closest to the facts [3].
\nLooking for the culprit in the first response. The question about who got it wrong ends the conversation and teaches the team that next time it's better to wait [2].
\nMistaking a pleasant atmosphere for psychological safety. A close-knit team can produce fewer objections, not more, because cohesion reduces the willingness to challenge shared ideas [1].
\nLeaving everything to the annual anonymous survey. The survey takes a snapshot and doesn't change the day-to-day consequences for whoever speaks up, and anonymity confirms that speaking openly is risky.
\nRewarding those who solve things in silence. Recognizing someone who \"managed on their own\" reinforces the workaround, which consumes the time of qualified people and leaves the process as it was [3].
\nTreating the issue as a topic for a document. A values statement doesn't change the calculation of someone deciding whether to speak up: daily practices do, as described in the article on company culture.
\nConfusing operational reporting with the channel required by law. The mandatory internal whistleblowing channel — in Italy, for private employers with an average of at least fifty employees over the past year — concerns violations of legal provisions [5]: using it for a department problem makes formal what should stay routine.
\nThe three studies cited were conducted outside Italy in specific contexts: 51 work teams in a manufacturing company [1], 40 interviews with employees from different industries [2], 239 hours of observation in nine hospitals [3].
\nThe percentages reported describe those samples and don't measure how widespread the phenomenon is in Italian companies.
\nThe ISTAT data [4] describe ownership structure and the practices reported by Italian companies, not the reporting behaviors inside them.
\nThe relationships observed in work teams are statistical associations, not causal links: the author herself notes that the data don't specify leaders' behaviors in detail [1].
\nThe angle of this article is organizational: it concerns the way information about problems circulates in a company, not individual psychological well-being, which has its own paths and professionals.
\nReports of violations of legal provisions follow a separate track [5] and remain outside the scope described here.
\nIt is the belief shared by the members of a team that the team is a safe place for interpersonal risk-taking, such as admitting a mistake or raising a difficult issue [1].
\nIt is a property of the team, not a trait of the individual.
\nNo: psychological safety includes interpersonal trust but describes the climate of a team, while trust concerns the relationship between two people [1].
\nA team can be close-knit and produce few objections, because cohesion reduces the willingness to challenge shared ideas [1].
\nWatch where bad news comes from and what happens to it: information coming in from clients, problems worked around with makeshift fixes, objections that show up after the meeting and not during it.
\nA reprimand assumes the cause is negligence, while the two most frequent causes are something else.
\nWhen the cause is the payoff of keeping quiet, the reprimand adds one more reason to stay silent; when it's the inability to recognize the problem, it demands a skill that hasn't been taught.
\nPsychological safety is a property of the team and is measured by what the team manages to say, not by the tone in which it says it.
\nIts absence can be recognized by concrete signs: bad news arriving from outside, problems worked around in silence, objections postponed to the hallway, reports with no follow-up.
\nBehind the silence there are two different causes — for some, keeping quiet pays off; for others, the problem isn't visible as such — and the first is addressed by changing the consequences for whoever speaks up, the second by teaching people to recognize a gap against a reference.
\nIn the thirty seconds after a report, the leader thanks before evaluating, asks what made the event possible instead of who got it wrong, asks about the facts and states what will happen.
\nThe practices that hold up over time are four: closing the loop with whoever reported, a criterion that separates the fact from the person, a recurring question in a moment that already exists, an example told in full.
\nThe mistakes that send you back to square one are asking for problems already solved, looking for the culprit in the first response, and rewarding those who make do on their own.
\nPsychological safety is not a pleasant atmosphere: it is the belief that bringing up a problem pays off more than keeping it to yourself.
\nAs long as that belief is missing, silence remains the reasonable choice for the people doing the work, and the two reasons why problems don't reach you — the payoff of keeping quiet and the inability to see them — call for opposite remedies.
\nThe first is addressed by changing the consequences for whoever speaks up: thank before you evaluate, ask what happened rather than who got it wrong, state the follow-up.
\nThe second is addressed by showing what counts as a problem, with examples told in full in front of the team.
\nThe daily practices that shape the climate are in the article on company culture, and the form of the conversation that follows a report is in the guide to feedback to team members.
\nWhat makes it worthwhile or costly to act before being asked is covered on the page about proactivity at work.
\nTo receive the next in-depth articles, you can subscribe to the newsletter.
\nA company where speaking up pays off can be recognized by two concrete things.
\nProblems arrive when they cost little, instead of when a client reports them.
\nMeetings contain the objections that used to be heard in the hallway, and the leader stops being the last to know.
\n\n[1] Edmondson, A. C., \"Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams\", Administrative Science Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, 1999, pp. 350-383, DOI 10.2307/2666999 (study of 51 work teams in a US manufacturing company). Full text read at: https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Organizational_Learning_and_Change/Edmondson_1999_Psychological_safety.pdf
\n[2] Milliken, F. J., Morrison, E. W., Hewlin, P. F., \"An Exploratory Study of Employee Silence: Issues that Employees Don't Communicate Upward and Why\", Journal of Management Studies, vol. 40, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1453-1476, DOI 10.1111/1467-6486.00387 (40 interviews with employees in different industries, United States). Full text read at: https://w4.stern.nyu.edu/emplibrary/Milliken.Frances.pdf
\n[3] Tucker, A. L., Edmondson, A. C., \"Why Hospitals Don't Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics That Inhibit System Change\", California Management Review, vol. 45, no. 2, 2003, pp. 55-72, DOI 10.2307/41166165 (239 hours of observation of 26 nurses in nine US hospitals). HBS working paper 03-059 read at: https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/03-059_12b5444c-de66-4935-a12d-9a9b3688f62d.pdf
\n[4] ISTAT, \"Censimento permanente delle imprese 2023: primi risultati\", statistical report, November 14, 2023 (reference year 2022; universe of 1,021,618 companies with at least 3 employees). Available at: https://www.istat.it/comunicato-stampa/censimento-permanente-delle-imprese-2023-primi-risultati/ — PDF: https://www.istat.it/it/files/2023/11/REPORTCensimprese.pdf
\n[5] Decreto legislativo 10 marzo 2023, n. 24, \"Attuazione della direttiva (UE) 2019/1937 riguardante la protezione delle persone che segnalano violazioni del diritto dell'Unione\", Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, Serie Generale no. 63, March 15, 2023 (articles 1, 2 and 4). Available at: https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/id/2023/03/15/23G00032/sg
","headings":[{"level":2,"text":"What psychological safety really means, and what it should be distinguished from","id":"what-psychological-safety-really-means-and-what-it-should-be-distinguished-from"},{"level":2,"text":"The signs that tell you when problems stop before they reach you","id":"the-signs-that-tell-you-when-problems-stop-before-they-reach-you"},{"level":2,"text":"The two reasons for silence: the payoff of keeping quiet and the problem nobody sees","id":"the-two-reasons-for-silence-the-payoff-of-keeping-quiet-and-the-problem-nobody-sees"},{"level":2,"text":"The first thirty seconds after a report: what leaders do","id":"the-first-thirty-seconds-after-a-report-what-leaders-do"},{"level":2,"text":"From landmine to opportunity: the practices that make bringing up a problem worthwhile","id":"from-landmine-to-opportunity-the-practices-that-make-bringing-up-a-problem-worthwhile"},{"level":2,"text":"The most common mistakes in building a speak-up culture","id":"the-most-common-mistakes-in-building-a-speak-up-culture"},{"level":2,"text":"Limitations and conditions of applicability","id":"limitations-and-conditions-of-applicability"},{"level":2,"text":"FAQ","id":"faq"},{"level":3,"text":"What is psychological safety at work?","id":"what-is-psychological-safety-at-work"},{"level":3,"text":"Are psychological safety and trust the same thing?","id":"are-psychological-safety-and-trust-the-same-thing"},{"level":3,"text":"How can you tell if a team lacks it?","id":"how-can-you-tell-if-a-team-lacks-it"},{"level":3,"text":"Should team members who don't report problems be reprimanded?","id":"should-team-members-who-dont-report-problems-be-reprimanded"},{"level":2,"text":"Practical summary","id":"practical-summary"},{"level":2,"text":"Conclusion","id":"conclusion"},{"level":2,"text":"Sources and references","id":"sources-and-references"}],"tldr":"A problem that has been dragging on for weeks in a department, and that the business owner finds out about from a client: had the team member not noticed it, or had they decided not to say anything?","tldrItems":null}