Amy Edmondson

Who they are

Edmondson holds the Novartis chair at Harvard Business School, according to the school's alumni listing, which gives her degrees as an AB in 1981, an AM in 1995 and a PhD in 1996, all from Harvard. Her research is on teams, learning and the conditions under which people raise problems and mistakes.

The vault's reading of her sources places her as a doctoral student of J. Richard Hackman, which puts the construct inside his tradition of research on work groups rather than beside it. Her books include The Fearless Organization, published by Wiley, and Right Kind of Wrong, published by Atria in the United States and Penguin in the United Kingdom in September 2023.

Her name travels further than her papers. Some books build whole chapters on psychological safety without naming her, and others name her once and then use the term as a list item. Where this site meets the idea, it credits the 1999 paper for the construct.

Key papers

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. doi:10.2307/2666999.

A multimethod field study of 51 work teams in one manufacturing company. She introduced team psychological safety, a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, and examined it alongside team efficacy. Psychological safety was associated with learning behaviour. Team efficacy was not, once psychological safety was controlled for. Learning behaviour mediated the link between psychological safety and team performance. This site has read the abstract, not the full text.

Key ideas

The core claim is about a belief held by a group. Psychological safety is a property of the team, not a personality trait of its members, and it concerns what people expect to happen to them if they take an interpersonal risk, such as asking a question, admitting an error or disagreeing with someone senior.

That is why it matters for the silent meeting examined in Why Does Nobody Speak Up in Meetings. If people expect a risk to be punished, waiting for someone else to speak first is a sensible choice. The extension from manufacturing teams to meetings in general is an inference, not a result in the 1999 paper.

Three cautions apply. Popular reception has flattened the idea into being nice, which is close to the opposite of what the paper argues, and the vault records that Edmondson has acknowledged this flattening herself. Google's internal team research, widely cited in support, is corporate research that popularised the finding without establishing it. And the direction of cause is open: people who are proactive may perceive their environments as safer, or their behaviour may make environments safer. Both readings should travel with the construct.

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