The Field Guide › Paper
Edmondson's group-level conceptual chapter is the standard reference for distinguishing psychological safety from interpersonal trust, and it is the piece that keeps the two constructs from collapsing into one another. Both turn on a willingness to be vulnerable to others' actions, but Edmondson separates them along three dimensions. The first is object of focus: trust concerns whether others' future actions will be favourable to one's interests (a focus on the other), whereas psychological safety concerns whether others will give oneself the benefit of the doubt when one asks a question, admits a mistake, or proposes an idea (a focus on the self). The second is temporal frame: the tacit calculus of psychological safety weighs the very short-term interpersonal consequences of a specific act, while trust ranges over anticipated consequences across a much wider horizon. The third is level of analysis: psychological safety is theorised as an emergent property of the group, holding at the team level because members are subject to shared influences and develop beliefs out of shared experience, whereas trust operates primarily in the dyad. Around this distinction the chapter builds a fuller model than Edmondson's earlier statements of it: five antecedents of team psychological safety (leader behaviour that is accessible, invites input and models fallibility; trusting and respectful peer relationships; the use of off-line 'practice fields'; supportive organisational context; and emergent, informal group dynamics) and five learning-oriented consequences (help-seeking, feedback-seeking, speaking up about errors and concerns, innovative behaviour, and boundary spanning), with psychological safety positioned as the substrate that lowers the interpersonal cost of each. Drawing together field data from operating-room, nursing, new-product-development, management and manufacturing teams, it also reviews the survey- and interview-based measures used to operationalise the construct across those settings. Trust, on this account, is likely a prerequisite for team psychological safety but is not the same thing; the chapter's lasting contribution is to make that boundary explicit and defensible, and it is the reference later work (Carmeli and Gittell, in this corpus) leans on when it needs to hold the two apart.