# Safety in High-Reliability Organizations: The Role of Upward Voice, Team Learning, and Safety Climate *Silla, Gajudo & Gracia · Voice & Silence, Safety & Error, Team Learning · Journal of Safety Research · 2025 · Open access* Finds that upward voice reaches safety performance through team learning, and by no other route this study could detect. Silla and colleagues surveyed 617 workers across two nuclear power plants belonging to one Spanish operator, a response rate of 76.55% covering all responsibility levels and functional areas, and modelled upward voice as an antecedent of safety performance mediated by team learning, with safety climate moderating the path from voice to learning. The result the authors did not predict is the one worth having. The direct effect of upward voice on safety performance was not statistically significant once team learning was controlled for, so their first hypothesis failed and what the data support is full mediation. Upward voice predicted team learning strongly, team learning predicted safety performance, and the bootstrapped indirect effect was 0.20 with a confidence interval of 0.16 to 0.24. For a corpus that keeps arguing that speaking and being heard are different things, this is useful evidence: in these plants no direct contribution of voice to safety behaviour was detectable once team learning was accounted for. The moderation, which the abstract leads with, deserves more caution than it gets. Safety climate did moderate the voice to learning path in the predicted direction, but the interaction added 0.3% of explained variance, the conditional indirect effect moves only from 0.09 at one standard deviation below the mean of safety climate to 0.12 one standard deviation above, and the index of moderated mediation is 0.017 with a lower confidence bound of 0.0004. The direction is right and the effect clears conventional thresholds; it is also small, and the claim that safety climate strengthens the benefit of voice should be read at that scale. Two things need keeping straight. The psychological safety climate of the paper's own section heading is not Edmondson's construct: the authors take it from James and James, meaning one individual's perceptions of safety related policies, practices and procedures as distinct from the shared group level version, and they measure it with items adapted from Zohar and Luria's nuclear safety climate questionnaire. Upward voice, meanwhile, is measured with three items the research team developed from previous literature, and they ask about felt freedom rather than about anything anyone did, one of them reading that the respondent feels free to talk to the boss about any problems and difficulties without any fear at all. That is nearer a psychological safety item than a voice behaviour item, and the paper's own definition, the degree to which employees feel free to raise concerns to their superiors, says as much. The finding is therefore better read as perceived safety to speak predicting team learning, which makes it a psychological safety result wearing another name, and leaves enacted voice untested. The authors chose voice rather than safety voice on purpose, arguing that in a tightly coupled plant the discrepancies that matter early do not announce themselves as safety issues. The remaining limits are largely acknowledged. The design is cross-sectional, so the mediation chain is a model imposed on a single moment rather than an observed sequence, and the authors accept the voice to learning relationship may run both ways. Every variable is self-reported by the same people at the same sitting, including safety performance, which sits at a mean of 4.44 on a five point scale and is reported as leptokurtic. Team learning and safety climate correlate at 0.78 with alpha coefficients of 0.96 apiece, which is close enough to raise a fair question about whether they are two constructs or one, and the confirmatory model clears the authors' own fit thresholds with a comparative fit index of 0.91 rather than comfortably. It is one organisation, in one industry, in one country. Worth noting for this map: the paper cites the Noort and colleagues review on whether safety voice and voice are distinct constructs, and their argument that voice is an ecological phenomenon whose correlates depend on context, which is the direction this finding points. - **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/silla-gajudo-gracia-2025/ - **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2025.02.002 - **Interactive map:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/?mode=papers&node=silla-gajudo-gracia-2025 ## Neighbours (16) - [Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-1999.md) (paper) - [Employee Voice and Silence](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/morrison-2014.md) (paper) - [Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/perrow-1984.md) (paper) - [Organizing for High Reliability: Processes of Collective Mindfulness](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/weick-sutcliffe-obstfeld-1999.md) (paper) - [Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/rasmussen-1997.md) (paper) - [Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Innovate and Improve](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/cannon-edmondson-2005.md) (paper) - [Safety Voice and Safety Listening During Aviation Accidents: Cockpit Voice Recordings Reveal That Speaking-Up to Power Is Not Enough](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/noort-reader-gillespie-2021.md) (paper) - [Speaking Up in the Operating Room: How Team Leaders Promote Learning in Interdisciplinary Action Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/edmondson-2003b.md) (paper) - [Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/janis-1982.md) (paper) - [Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/detert-edmondson-2011.md) (paper) - [Learning Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/learning-teams.md) - [Voice Flows to and around Leaders: Understanding When Units Are Helped or Hurt by Employee Voice](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/detert-burris-harrison-martin-2013.md) (paper) - [Amplifying Weak Signals](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/amplifying-weak-signals.md) - [Measuring PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/measure-psychological-safety.md) - [Speaking Up at Work](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/speaking-up-at-work.md) - [Exploring the Core of Crew Resource Management Course: Speak Up or Stay Silent](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/espevik-saus-olsen-2017.md) (paper)