The Field Guide › Article
A Psychological Safety Research Pulse survey by Jade Garratt and Tom Geraghty (n=61) on how workplace feedback affects both performance and psychological safety. It complicates the idea that feedback is uniformly beneficial: around two-thirds of respondents said feedback often or sometimes aided their learning and development, yet 80% reported it sometimes or often undermined their confidence or motivation, and two-thirds found it frequently irrelevant or without impact. The effect on psychological safety was strikingly bimodal rather than neutral: though the average sat at 'no effect', 42% felt feedback had generally left them less safe while 39% felt it had left them more safe, a split read as evidence that feedback is delivered well in some settings and badly in others. The piece sets this beside the practice's workshop data, in which participants typically judge roughly a quarter of the feedback received across their careers to have helped, half to have been useless, and a quarter to have been actively detrimental. The conclusion is that the problem is not feedback as such but its delivery: tone, timing, relevance, and whether it is framed as an act of learning or as judgement; feedback is one of the most powerful levers on psychological safety, but only when it reinforces dignity and relevance rather than threat. The finding that a large share of feedback is experienced as harmful closely echoes Kluger and DeNisi's meta-analytic result that over a third of feedback interventions reduce performance.