In our previous blog posts, you may have read what psychological safety is and why it matters. To summarize: experiencing psychological safety means feeling secure enough to take interpersonal risks such as giving feedback, sharing your opinion, addressing conflict, or admitting mistakes. Feeling safe in this way has many benefits. We know that employees and teams who feel psychologically safe:

• Learn more
• Feel more engaged
• Perform better on tasks
• Are more creative
• Take on additional responsibilities
• …

Sounds great, right? It really is. No catch, no fine print. So why don’t we all feel (psychologically) safe at work yet? Because creating that sense of safety isn’t always straightforward. Often, unintentional behaviors or actions can lower that feeling of safety. In our previous article, we already explained how you can get started if you want to work on this. In this blog series, we’ll dive deeper into the underlying factors that support psychological safety. Because beyond a well-crafted (or more chaotic) action plan, there are predictors that impact psychological safety and can either support or undermine your efforts.

To keep things clear, we’ve grouped the predictors into three levels:

• Individual: What personal and job-related characteristics make it easier or harder to experience psychological safety?
• Team and leadership: What team and leadership characteristics influence psychological safety?
• Organization: What organizational features and structures help foster psychological safety?

Of course, these levels sometimes overlap—you’ll notice that when reading the blog posts side by side. But we hope this structure helps you better assess your own environment. Let’s start with the first level: the individual. Some factors are hard for a person to change, while others are more within their control.

First of all, there are certain characteristics closely related to personality. People who score higher on traits such as proactive personality, emotional stability, openness to experience, and learning orientation tend to feel psychologically safer. These traits are definitely worth considering in selection processes. But also know that diversity in teams matters—there’s no need for everyone to score high on everything. In fact, too much of the same is not ideal either.

We also see certain task-related factors playing a role. Autonomy is important, but so is collaboration—being dependent on others, and others on you. It’s all about balance between autonomy and teamwork.

Your role within that collaboration also needs to be clear, and you should have a sense of personal responsibility. So when designing roles, whether structurally or during interventions, it’s important to consider job design and how responsibilities are distributed.

Lastly, there are social aspects of your job that help foster psychological safety. First, you need sufficient interaction with your colleagues. Without regular contact, it’s hard to build safety. Also, mutual support between you and your colleagues gives a strong boost. These interactions should extend beyond your immediate team—people in other teams, departments, and even (internal) clients all count. And finally, a good relationship with your manager plays a key role in how safe you feel at work.

So, how do we approach this? It starts with good task design. If tasks are chopped into small bits, follow rigid procedures, and involve little collaboration or interaction, it becomes harder (though not impossible) to develop psychological safety. Design jobs in a way that naturally fosters a sense of safety. Note that these same factors are often predictors of engagement or innovative behavior as well. Also, in teams where you want to foster psychological safety and are bringing in new members, take the above personal characteristics into account during hiring. Not everyone needs to score high across the board, but without people who are naturally comfortable giving feedback or addressing conflict, there won’t be role models for others to follow. The next step is ensuring that the interactions you do have go well. Don’t set the bar too high right away—being able to give constructive feedback, offer supportive help, or communicate effectively with your manager are all essential skills that help raise the quality of interactions. Besides all this, it’s important that people in leadership, coaching, or HR roles have a solid understanding of what psychological safety is (and isn’t). That knowledge will help guide and support others more effectively.

In the next blog post, we’ll move on to the team level. But for now, take a moment to reflect: which individual-level factors are already present in your job or team? Chances are you’ve got a solid foundation—and you’ll also spot where you can quickly make progress!

Interested in how to practically implement psychological safety in your organization?

• Register for our (free) live event ‘Psychological Safety in Practice’ via this link
• Join one of our open training programs via this link
• Or check out our full offering on psychological safety on our website