Is Your Team Psychologically Safe?

As part of our Attachment at Work series, we’re exploring the importance of psychological safety and how to nurture a psychologically safe workplace.

Psychological safety at work describes the ability to take risks, like sharing ideas, concerns, or mistakes, without fear of consequences or humiliation. The study of psychological safety was pioneered by Professor Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School¹. One study described psychological safety as:

“In a psychologically safe work environment, employees feel that their colleagues will not reject people for being themselves or saying what they think, respect each other’s competence, are interested in each other as people, have positive intentions to one another, are able engage in constructive conflict or confrontation, and feel that it is safe to experiment and take risks.”²

A psychologically safe work environment is vital, not only for its employees but for the wider company’s success: when employees are happy, secure in their teams, and able to share suggestions for improvement, problems can be solved more efficiently. Psychological safety has been associated with many positive outcomes in the workplace, including peer support, good relationships with leaders, autonomy, and a good attitude to learning³.

Because psychological safety in teams is so important, we decided to include it in our Attachment at Work study. The Attachment at Work study explores how your workplace attachment style – made up of workplace attachment anxiety and workplace attachment avoidance – is related to your experiences at work and your emotional wellbeing.

About Our Attachment at Work Study

Our Attachment at Work study aimed to find out how your workplace attachment style – how anxious or avoidant your attachment is to your colleagues – relates to your experiences at work and in your inner life.

From our trialling process, we were able to identify a set of questions that successfully measure attachment at work as a new idea, separate to the attachment we experience with our romantic partners, family, or friends!

64,240 people took part in our study across several different surveys, answering different sets of questions to make up our complete set of data.

For a detailed overview of the Attachment at Work study, check out our article: What is Attachment at Work?

TAKE OUR FREE ATTACHMENT AT WORK TEST

Today, we’re discussing the findings from our investigation of the relationship between psychological safety and Attachment at Work based on 3,352 responses. High scores on psychological safety indicate a sense of acceptance and ability to take risks at work.

Psychological Safety and Attachment at Work

Your Attachment at Work measures your workplace attachment security – in other words, the quality of the relationships you have with your colleagues in terms of attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety. Higher scores on workplace attachment avoidance and workplace attachment anxiety indicate lower workplace attachment security.

People reporting higher psychological safety reported more secure Attachment at Work, and particularly lower workplace attachment avoidance. This makes sense – attachment security is associated with feeling supported in taking risks, with others as a safe base to return to if things go wrong. If we perceive that other people will support us even if we’re wrong, we can find it easier to put ourselves on the line to challenge the status quo.

Psychological Safety and Workplace Attachment Anxiety

When our levels of attachment anxiety are high, we tend to have a positive view of others and a negative view of ourselves. We can also be highly dependent on others for validation – instead of a self-view driven by our own internal sense of value, the way we feel about ourselves can be driven by how we think others value us.

This is why social rejection can create so much fear and the need to people-please: our sense of self depends on our acceptance from others. Risking that acceptance to be creative, highlight a problem, or do something outside of the group norm means risking our own sense of internal value.

This might explain why people with higher workplace attachment anxiety tend to score lower in psychological safety – feeling less able to take risks in a social context is part and parcel of attachment anxiety.

Psychological Safety and Workplace Attachment Avoidance

Opposing attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance comes with a negative view of others but a relatively positive view of ourselves. Even though people with attachment avoidance might feel more self-reliant, they still don’t have the safe base to take risks from that people with secure attachments do.

When we have an avoidant attachment style, we typically do want to be accepted by our peers, but we might find it more difficult to trust that our peers will accept us as we are – we might even make the assumption that they won’t before we even give them a chance. Therefore, we might avoid revealing too much about ourselves or drawing too much attention, contributing to a lower likelihood that we’ll feel able to voice our opinions.

Overall, the negative view of others that’s often held by people with high attachment avoidance likely explains why the relationship between workplace attachment avoidance and psychological safety was almost 2x stronger than the relationship between workplace attachment anxiety and psychological safety.

Other Factors in Psychological Safety

We were also interested in whether your work or personal situation might be related to psychological safety. To find out, we compared psychological safety with remote working status, professional status, gender, and parenthood.

Remote workers reported the highest psychological safety, followed by hybrid workers, with full-time office workers reporting the lowest psychological safety. It’s possible that physical distance from teams might act as a protective barrier from fear of social consequences.

Looking at professional status, business owners reported the highest psychological safety, followed by contractors, then employed managers, with employed non-managers reporting the lowest psychological safety.

Men reported slightly higher psychological safety than women. This is likely due to women’s experiences in the workplace – in 2024, McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace report found that 38% of women had their judgement questioned in their area of expertise compared to 26% of men, 18% of women were mistaken for someone at a lower career level than they actually were compared with 10% of men, and 39% of women experienced being interrupted or spoken over more than others compared with 20% of men⁴.

We found no difference in psychological safety for participants with or without children.

TAKE OUR FREE ATTACHMENT AT WORK TEST

Nurturing Psychologically Safe Teams

Psychological safety positively contributes to teams and the individuals working in them, so increasing psychological safety should be a priority for team leaders. Improving workplace attachment security within a team could promote psychological safety, which could, in turn, boost workplace attachment security in a positive feedback loop.

Based on our research, office workers, workers with less autonomy, and women could benefit the most from support to feel psychologically safe at work. To get personalized tips and learn more about your team’s dynamics, including their combined psychological safety score and workplace attachment style, take our free Attachment at Work test and opt-in to your comprehensive Attachment at Work report.

References

1. Edmondson AC, Lei Z. Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav.. 2014 Mar 21;1(1):23-43.
2. Newman A, Donohue R, Eva N. Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human resource management review. 2017 Sep 1;27(3):521-35.
3. Frazier ML, Fainshmidt S, Klinger RL, Pezeshkan A, Vracheva V. Psychological safety: A meta‐analytic review and extension. Personnel psychology. 2017 Feb;70(1):113-65.
4. McKinley & Company. Women’s Experiences. Women in the Workplace. Accessed 2025 Nov 6; https://www.flipsnack.com/78C9ACFF8D6/women-in-the-workplace-2024/full-view.html