Team check · 7 questions · 2 minutes
How safe is it to
speak up in your team?
These are the seven questions of the Team Psychological Safety scale, published by Amy Edmondson in 1999 and widely used in research since. Think of the team you work in now and say how accurately each sentence describes it.
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Your result
/ 7
How to read this. Your score is the average of your seven answers, with the three negatively worded sentences turned around so that higher always means safer. In Edmondson's study, the average team scored 5.25. That number is the average of whole teams at one company, not a norm for single people, so use it as a rough reference point, not a pass mark.
Where to start
The two sentences you rated lowest, with one thing to try for each.
These suggestions are practical ideas based on Edmondson's later writing on psychological safety. They were not tested in the 1999 study.
Why it matters
Edmondson surveyed 427 people in 51 teams at a US office furniture manufacturer. Teams that felt safer reported more learning behaviour: asking for feedback, talking about mistakes, asking for help. And teams that did more of that were rated as performing better by managers outside the team.
Honest caveat. This was one company, a survey at one point in time, and a small number of teams, as the paper itself notes. It shows that these things go together, not that one causes the other. A later meta analysis pooling 136 samples and over 22,000 people (Frazier et al., 2017) reviews the wider evidence.
Make it a team measure
The scale was built to describe a team, not one person's view. One answer tells you how you experience the team. For the real picture, ask everyone to fill it in anonymously and compare the averages, especially the sentences where people disagree.
Source
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350 to 383. Items from the appendix, 7 point scale from "very inaccurate" to "very accurate", reliability α = .82.
- Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113 to 165.
This is a reflection tool, not a diagnosis or a formal assessment of your team.