How safe is too safe? A dual-pathway framework for understanding the dark side of psychological safety

Cangiano · Critique & Boundary, Voice & Silence · Frontiers in Psychology · 2026 · Open access

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Cangiano's conceptual paper argues that psychological safety works through two pathways at once. Alongside the familiar enabling pathway, in which lowering interpersonal risk brings unvoiced ideas into deliberation, it proposes a regulatory loss pathway: anticipating interpersonal evaluation both inhibits expression and disciplines it, making people prepare before speaking, weigh whether a point is worth the group's time and hold to shared standards. As interpersonal risk approaches zero, on this account, the discipline weakens along with the fear, through filtering loss, effort withdrawal and norm erosion; moderate reductions leave it largely intact. Seven propositions follow, among them that psychological safety relates more strongly to voice quantity than quality, that its benefits are stronger in deliberation than execution, and that its relationship with performance is an inverted U, very high levels associated with decline particularly where coordination demands are high or external accountability is weak. Formal accountability, leader structuring and internalised norms are proposed as compensating conditions, and crew resource management is read as calibrated psychological safety.

The claim is framed as conditional. Cangiano states that psychological safety is not defined as tolerance of poor performance, and the discussion says the level of psychological safety is not the operative variable; what matters is whether surrounding regulatory structures remain strong enough to discipline the expression it enables.

It is a conceptual analysis with no new data, and it does not test its own propositions. Its table gives one paper, Eldor, Hodor and Cappelli (2023), reporting five studies, as the sole key reference for the inverted U. The regulatory pathway draws on accountability, social loafing, self-regulation, brainstorming and voice-quality research, and the bridge from loafing rests on a premise Cangiano states openly: that people cannot finely distinguish a climate where honest errors carry no social penalty from one where low-effort contributions carry none. The direct evidence offered for that premise is Pearsall and Ellis (2011). The briefing, surgical and product-team scenarios are illustrations, not reported cases, and existing scales, the paper notes, do not separate interpersonal safety from evaluative pressure.

Cangiano, F. (2026) 'How safe is too safe? A dual-pathway framework for understanding the dark side of psychological safety', Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1879175.

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