The Field Guide › Paper
An empirical study extending psychological safety out of the workplace and into competitive sport, testing how it behaves inside the coach-athlete relationship. Across 379 athletes from a spread of team and individual sports, Jowett and colleagues use structural equation modelling to trace a path: athletes' capacity for open communication and conflict management with their coaches predicts their sense of psychological safety within the group (openness the stronger of the two), and that safety in turn predicts the quality of the coach-athlete relationship (closeness, commitment, complementarity). The key claim is mediational: psychological safety carries the link between communication and relationship quality, and the pattern holds equally for male and female athletes. The reading offered is that a coach who can invite candour and manage disagreement builds the safety within which athletes will take interpersonal risks (raising concerns, admitting mistakes) without fear of humiliation, and that this is what deepens trust, respect and cooperation. For a corpus centred on the workplace the value is the transfer: it is one of the few empirical demonstrations that the construct behaves the same way in a very different, inherently competitive arena, using Edmondson's own seven-item scale, and it grounds the coaching strand (the listening, trust and letting-go-of-control a good coach practises) in data rather than assertion. Its limits are the ones the authors name: the design is cross-sectional and self-reported, so it captures association rather than causation or temporal order; the analysis is individual rather than dyadic or team level; and the sample is culturally homogeneous (principally British and white), which they flag as the first thing future work should widen. It also sits inside a live definitional argument in sport, where Vella, Taylor and colleagues have questioned whether 'psychological safety' is even the right frame for the field.