Building a Fearless Organization: A Fieldbook for Creating Psychological Safety at Work

Edmondson & Kerrissey · Origins, Voice & Silence, Team Learning · John Wiley & Sons · 2026 · Paywalled

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A fieldbook by Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey, published by Wiley in November 2026, which the publisher describes as turning the theory of psychological safety into practical action, for leaders, managers, executives, teams and organisational development professionals. It has three parts. Part I, Understanding Psychological Safety, covers what psychological safety is, what it is not, and what it means for the workplace. Part II, The Psychological Safety Toolkit, has chapters on setting the stage, inviting engagement and responding productively, and one titled It Starts with You. Part III, Working with Your Team, covers scaffolding, joint problem-solving and mentoring a team, and an appendix sets out a leadership toolkit.

Note: not to be confused with the psychological safety toolkit on psychsafety.com (psychsafety.com/tool-kit), which has been in publication since 2020.

The opening chapter defines psychological safety as a shared belief that an environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, for asking questions, admitting mistakes, raising concerns, offering ideas or volunteering to try something new. By climate it means the atmosphere that forms among a group of people, built from accumulated signals: how a leader responds when someone raises a problem, whether admitting uncertainty is treated as honesty or weakness, and whether a dissenting view is engaged or dismissed. Later it puts what psychological safety is about as the shared sense that speaking up is not just permitted but welcome, and that doing so will not cost you. It dates what it believes is the first use of the term in management research to a 1960s book on organisational change by Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, credits Edmondson's work of the late 1990s with the measurement tools and the first systematic empirical evidence linking team psychological safety to team learning and performance, and summarises the 2023 review by Edmondson and Derrick Bransby, which synthesised 185 studies from the prior decade. Among the research it is excited about, it names more evidence-based interventions, a more precise understanding of how psychological safety changes over time, and more diverse methods of measurement.

In our reading (Tom Geraghty's, of the whole book), the Part II toolkit positions the leader as the agent of safety: setting the stage, inviting engagement and responding productively are things a leader does, and the rest of the team mostly receives the climate that results. The book does point beyond the leader: its index lists leadership by everyone, and modelling psychological safety by all team members, both at p. 128. It also takes up power in discussion, in the order of speakers and the HiPPO principle (pp. 148-149). But as we read it, the book skirts around power gradients themselves, and its tools are still built around what the leader does. It recommends the five whys as a practice for exploring mistakes, with a brief walk-through (p. 110). Five whys, as we read it, follows a single causal chain to a root cause, which sits uneasily with Human and Organisational Performance thinking: that looks to the conditions of work and how it normally succeeds, rather than to a single cause.

We see it as a valuable entry point, particularly for leaders, best read alongside approaches that treat psychological safety as a shared team practice, and learning from failure as an inquiry into conditions, not people. Built from Wiley's published description, table of contents, index and first chapter, and from Tom Geraghty's reading of the book.

Edmondson, A.C. and Kerrissey, M. (2026) Building a Fearless Organization: A Fieldbook for Creating Psychological Safety at Work. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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