# When Is Psychological Safety Helpful in Organizations? A Longitudinal Study

*Higgins · Critique & Boundary, Measurement & Method, Culture & Context · Academy of Management Discoveries · 2022 · Paywalled*

The first longitudinal test of psychological safety at organisation rather than team level, and the paper most likely to be quoted at anyone arguing for psychological safety, so worth reading precisely. Across 545 New York City public schools, three annual waves and over 170,000 teacher survey responses, organisation-level psychological safety on its own was negatively associated with a school meeting its federal performance target, felt accountability was positively associated with it, and the best-performing combination over time was relatively low psychological safety with relatively high felt accountability. The authors are candid that this surprised them. Their proposed mechanism is attention: without accountability anchoring what the space is for, a comfortable climate may become what they call a complaining zone rather than a practice zone, so people speak freely about matters that do not move the work. Four limits change what the finding can be used for, and the first is the authors' own. Psychological safety never went low in absolute terms: the low condition scored 2.6 on a four-point scale, so this is evidence that within a moderate-to-high band more is not automatically better, not evidence that a fearful workplace performs well. The outcome is Adequate Yearly Progress, a contested binary test-based measure the authors acknowledge as controversial, and one the construct was never theorised to predict; psychological safety is a learning theory and this is an attainment metric. The context has almost no interdependence, since teachers work alone behind classroom doors, which removes the condition under which team-level psychological safety is supposed to operate at all. And organisation-level psychological safety measured with this school as the referent is a different construct from the team-level original, aggregated rather than shared through interaction. Read as a boundary-condition study, which is what it claims to be: it establishes that psychological safety is not a free-standing good that always helps, that it works alongside accountability rather than instead of it, and that the effect needs time to show. Read as proof that psychological safety is overrated, it is being asked to carry an argument its own authors do not make. Published in Academy of Management Discoveries, which exists for exploratory phenomenon-driven work that precedes theory rather than testing it.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/higgins-et-al-2022/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2018.0242
- **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=higgins-et-al-2022

## Neighbours (12)

- [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-1999.md) (paper)
- [Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/frazier-et-al-2017.md) (paper)
- [Accountability](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/accountability.md)
- [Personal and Organizational Change Through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/schein-bennis-1965.md) (paper)
- [Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-lei-2014.md) (paper)
- [Why Hospitals Don't Learn from Failures: Organizational and Dynamics That Inhibit System Change](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/tucker-edmondson-2003.md) (paper)
- [PS Isn't Enough](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/psychological-safety-isnt-enough.md)
- [Psychological Safety and Patient Safety: A Systematic and Narrative Review](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/montgomery-et-al-2025.md) (paper)
- [Watermelon Effect](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-watermelon-effect-and-greenwashing.md)
- [Beyond Metrics](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/beyond-metrics.md)
- [Slacking Off in Comfort: A Dual-Pathway Model for Psychological Safety Climate](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/deng-leung-lam-huang-2019.md) (paper)
- [Comfort vs Need](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/comfort-vs-need.md)