# Slacking Off in Comfort: A Dual-Pathway Model for Psychological Safety Climate

*Deng · Critique & Boundary, Team Learning · Journal of Management · 2019 · Open access*

Proposes that psychological safety climate has two competing effects on team learning and voice, not one: a 'bright' pathway (reducing fear of failure, which raises learning and voice, the standard Edmondson mechanism) and a 'dark' pathway (reducing perceived accountability, which lowers work motivation and so lowers learning and voice), with the two partly cancelling out. Study 1, a two-sample field survey aggregated to the group level, and Study 2, a laboratory experiment with ad hoc groups completing a creativity task under manipulated psychological safety conditions, both find support for the dual-pathway structure. The framing deserves more scrutiny than the paper's own tidy balance suggests, on two fronts. First, the 'dark' pathway rests on treating psychological safety as functionally equivalent to reduced accountability or evaluative pressure, which is a real conflation rather than a neutral operationalisation: Edmondson's own construct explicitly separates psychological safety from accountability as independent axes (the 'learning zone' being high on both, not psychological safety substituting for standards), and the passage this paper cites from her to motivate the dark pathway, about people becoming 'too comfortable' and drifting into casual conversation, reads in context as a warning about mistaking niceness for genuine psychological safety, not a claim about what properly-defined psychological safety itself does. Building a formal causal pathway out of that caveat risks testing a strawman version of the construct rather than the construct Edmondson actually defines, and whatever manipulation was used to create the lab experiment's 'high safety' condition needs to be read with that risk in mind: if it signals relaxed standards alongside reduced interpersonal risk, the experiment would confirm the same conflation driving the theory rather than test an independent mechanism against it. Second, the methodology has real limitations even setting the conflation aside: Study 1 pools two separately recruited convenience samples of very different sizes without an explicit equivalence check, and its 'groups' range down to dyads, for a construct that is meant to capture emergent, shared group-level climate; the reported aggregation statistics clear conventional thresholds, but those thresholds are known to run permissive in very small groups, where there is less room for genuine disagreement among only two or three raters to surface in the first place. None of this means the paper's more modest possible conclusion is wrong, that badly implemented or misunderstood psychological safety (the niceness-without-standards failure mode Edmondson herself warns against) can sap motivation, but the paper's actual framing goes further than that, presenting reduced accountability as a built-in consequence of psychological safety climate as such, which is a stronger and more contestable claim than the evidence here can really support.

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- **View the source paper:** https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1343109
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## Connected concepts (6)

- [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-1999.md) (paper)
- [Distinguishing Voice and Silence at Work: Unique Relationships with Perceived Impact, Psychological Safety, and Burnout](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/sherf-parke-isaakyan-2021.md) (paper)
- [PS Isn't Enough](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-isnt-enough.md)
- [When Feeling Safe Isn't Enough: Contextualizing Models of Safety and Learning in Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/sanner-bunderson-2015.md) (paper)
- [PS Index Critique](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-psychological-safety-index-a-critical-look.md)
- [Utility of PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-utility-of-psychological-safety.md)