The Field Guide › Paper
The foundational text on sensitivity training, T-groups, and laboratory education as a means of personal and organisational change. Schein and Bennis argue that genuine behavioural change — in individuals and organisations — requires a particular kind of learning environment: one characterised by psychological safety, honest feedback, and freedom from evaluative threat. This is one of the earliest explicit uses of the concept of psychological safety in the organisational literature, predating Edmondson by over three decades. The book develops the idea that people learn new behaviours only when they feel safe enough to experiment, make mistakes, and expose their uncertainty. The T-group method — unstructured small-group interaction with trained facilitation — was designed to create exactly these conditions. Directly cited by Kahn (1990) as a precursor to his own conceptualisation of psychological safety. A key text in the intellectual history of the field.