Psychological Safety Is Not a Hygiene Factor
It's a key to success in times of transformation
By | Amy C. Edmondson Ph.D. | www.psychologytoday.com
KEY POINTS
- Psychological safety should not be considered a baseline health and safety factor.
- A psychologically safe company culture is more challenging to build than most people realize.
- It is a powerful lever to increase performance and achieve excellence.
Co-authored with Per Hugander. Per is a strategic advisor helping executives achieve their goals by leveraging science and research in practice.
“Companies should mandate hygiene factors like ethics and psychological safety.”
The comment—made by a participant in an executive program a few minutes into the first discussion of a brand new Harvard Business School case study, Leading Culture Change at SEB—caught us both by surprise. We had worked together on the case, which tracked a successful attempt to influence culture at the fifteen-thousand employee Nordic bank, directly aimed at building psychological safety and perspective-taking so as to enable candid, rigorous conversations about strategic priorities. We each had the same thought at that moment: Psychological safety is not a hygiene factor—defined as something that must be present for a work environment to qualify as adequate, such as a paycheck, benefits, employee physical safety, freedom from harassment, and so forth. Elucidated by Frederick Herzberg, building on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, hygiene factors don’t create competitive advantage for a company. They merely satisfy basic expectations that free people up to focus on doing a good job. Creating psychological safety, in contrast, constitutes a high standard, an ambition that allows an organization to be truly excellent and capable of transformation.
