Psychological Safety Is Not About Comfort. It’s About Risk.

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I was facilitating a leadership team meeting when the head of operations raised a concern about a new initiative that wasn’t working. She was diplomatic but direct: the rollout timeline was unrealistic, the team was already stretched thin, and pushing forward as planned would likely result in poor execution and burnout.

Before anyone could respond, another leader cut in: “I don’t think this conversation is psychologically safe. We’re supposed to be supporting each other, not criticizing ideas in public.” The room went quiet. The operations head looked confused, then apologetic. The conversation shifted to safer territory. No one challenged anything for the rest of the meeting. Afterward, the CEO called me, frustrated. “We’ve invested so much in building psychological safety. We’ve done your training. We talk about it constantly. Now people use it as a shield. Anytime someone raises a difficult issue, someone else says it’s not ‘psychologically safe,’ and the conversation shuts down. How is that helping us?”

This is when I realized one of the most important concepts in organizational psychology has been so thoroughly misunderstood that it’s being weaponized to create exactly the opposite of what it was meant to build. Psychological safety has become synonymous with comfort. With niceness. By avoiding anything that might make anyone feel bad. Organizations think they’re building psychologically safe cultures by removing all discomfort, all challenge, all conflict. But that’s not what psychological safety means. And it’s not what the research shows creates high-performing teams.

What Amy Edmondson Actually Said

Let’s go back to the source. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor whose research gave us the term “psychological safety,” defined it very specifically in her foundational 1999 study:

“Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

Safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Not safe from risk-taking. Not comfortable. Not conflict-free. Not nice. Safe enough that people can take risks. What kind of risks? Edmondson’s research identified specific behaviors that require psychological safety:

• Admitting mistakes or lack of knowledge
• Asking questions, especially ones that might seem “dumb”
• Seeking feedback or help
• Challenging the status quo or authority
• Proposing new ideas that might fail
• Disagreeing with colleagues, including those with more power

Notice what all of these have in common: they’re interpersonally risky. They’re uncomfortable. They require vulnerability. They involve the possibility of looking foolish, being wrong, or causing friction. Psychological safety doesn’t eliminate that discomfort. It creates conditions where people are willing to experience the discomfort anyway because they trust it won’t result in punishment, humiliation, or marginalization. Edmondson’s more recent work (2023) makes this even more explicit. She writes: “Psychological safety is not about being nice. It’s not about lowering performance standards. It’s about candor. It’s about making it possible to have productive disagreement.”

High psychological safety doesn’t mean everyone feels comfortable all the time. It often means the opposite: people are frequently uncomfortable because they’re taking risks, challenging ideas, admitting uncertainty, and engaging in productive conflict. The team I was working with had it backward. They’d created a culture where no one felt uncomfortable, and mistook that for psychological safety. What they’d actually created was a culture where no one felt safe enough to risk making others uncomfortable by being honest.

The Crucial Distinction: Productive Discomfort vs. Threat

What organizations often miss is that there’s a profound difference between the discomfort of growth and the threat to psychological safety. You can be uncomfortable and still feel psychologically safe. In fact, the most psychologically safe environments I’ve worked in are often the most uncomfortable, because people are actually being honest.

For example, someone challenges your idea in a meeting, and you feel the heat of being questioned, but you know they’re trying to make the idea better, not make you look stupid. Or your manager gives you direct feedback about something that didn’t go well, and it stings, but you trust it’s aimed at your development, not your destruction. Both of these involve real discomfort. Yet, neither of them threatens psychological safety.

What threats to psychological safety actually look like: someone challenging your idea by making you look incompetent (“I can’t believe we’re even discussing this”)or a manager giving feedback designed to shame or diminish you, not develop you. It can also resemble a colleague disagreeing with you in a way that questions your intelligence or worth, not just your thinking. While the discomfort level might be similar in both lists, the psychological safety is completely different.

Research by Detert and Edmondson (2011) on voice and silence in organizations found that people can distinguish between “this is uncomfortable because it’s challenging” and “this is unsafe because I might be punished.” The former doesn’t silence people. The latter does. The problem is, many organizations have conflated the two. They think any discomfort is a sign of low psychological safety. So they work to eliminate all discomfort, all challenge, all friction. And in doing so, they eliminate the very conditions that enable learning, innovation, and high performance.

What Psychological Safety Actually Enables (And It’s Not Comfort)

What I see in teams with genuinely high psychological safety is actually a lot of disagreement. People challenge each other’s ideas directly. Meetings can get heated. There’s real debate, sometimes tension, occasionally frustration. I see people admitting when they’re confused, uncertain, or wrong. “I don’t actually understand this.” “I thought I knew, but I was wrong.” “I have no idea how to solve this problem.” These statements happen regularly, and they’re uncomfortable every single time. I see feedback flowing in all directions. Not just down, but up and sideways. Junior people telling senior people “that approach isn’t working” or “I disagree with that decision.” It’s awkward. It’s risky. It happens anyway. I also witnessed mistakes surface quickly rather than being hidden. “I messed this up,” instead of elaborate justifications or finger-pointing. The discomfort of admission is real, but it’s outweighed by the safety of knowing that honesty is valued more than perfection.

In psychologically safe departments, I can observe genuine conflict over ideas, approaches, and priorities. Not personal attacks, but genuine disagreement. And it doesn’t get smoothed over or avoided; it gets engaged with. None of this is comfortable. But it is psychologically safe.

Research on high-performing teams consistently shows that psychological safety is associated with more, not less, conflict (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003). Teams with high psychological safety have more task-related disagreement because people feel safe enough to voice different perspectives instead of just agreeing with whoever has the most power.

Studies on learning organizations show that psychological safety enables people to talk about failures, which is inherently uncomfortable (Edmondson, 2011). But that discomfort is what allows organizations to learn from mistakes rather than repeat them. Meta-analyses on innovation find that psychological safety is associated with greater risk-taking and experimentation, which in turn leads to more failure, more uncertainty, and more discomfort (Frazier et al., 2017). But also more breakthrough thinking. Psychological safety doesn’t create comfort. It creates the conditions where people are willing to be uncomfortable in the service of better outcomes.

How “Psychological Safety” Gets Weaponized

Where this misunderstanding becomes truly problematic is when people use “psychological safety” as a weapon to avoid accountability, shut down feedback, or prevent necessary conflict. Sadly, I see this constantly. Someone raises a performance issue, and the response is: “That doesn’t feel psychologically safe to talk about.” Someone gives critical feedback, and they’re told: “That’s not aligned with our psychologically safe culture.” A team needs to have a difficult conversation about dysfunction, and someone says, “We shouldn’t do this, it might damage psychological safety.”

This is psychological safety being used as a shield against anything hard or uncomfortable. And it’s the opposite of what the concept means. Real psychological safety would mean you CAN talk about the performance issue because you trust it won’t be used to destroy someone. You CAN give and receive critical feedback because the culture values growth over ego protection. You CAN have the difficult conversation about dysfunction because avoidance does more damage than honesty.

Most commonly, the weaponization I see is “I don’t feel psychologically safe” as a way to avoid accountability. When someone’s behavior or performance needs to be addressed, and they respond with “having this conversation doesn’t feel safe to me,” they’re often using psychological safety language to avoid responsibility. The question isn’t whether accountability conversations feel comfortable (they rarely do). The question is whether they’re conducted in ways that focus on behavior and impact rather than attacking character and worth.

Another example is,“We can’t say that — it’s not psychologically safe,” used to shut down dissent. When someone raises a concern or challenge, and others silence it by claiming it threatens safety, they’re confusing discomfort with danger. If the concern is raised respectfully, if it’s about the work and not an attack on people, then surfacing it is exactly what psychological safety is supposed to enable.

Finally, “This team isn’t psychologically safe” is used to explain why no one speaks up, when the real issue is no one wants to deal with conflict. Sometimes teams are actually psychologically safe, but people still don’t speak up because navigating disagreement is hard work, and avoiding it is easier. The silence isn’t from fear of punishment; it’s from preference for comfort. That’s a different problem requiring a different solution.

The weaponization is deceptive because it uses the language of safety and care to justify the opposite: avoiding truth, preventing growth, and maintaining dysfunctional patterns.

When Leaders Confuse Safety with Comfort

Leaders are particularly susceptible to this confusion. They want their teams to feel good. They want to be liked. They want to avoid the discomfort of conflict. So they create cultures where everyone is very comfortable and very stuck.

I worked with a leadership team that prided itself on its “psychologically safe” culture. They were kind to each other. Supportive. They never challenged each other’s ideas in meetings. Everyone left feeling good. However, their organization was failing. Slowly but steadily. Because no one was willing to say the hard things. No one challenged the CEO’s strategic direction, even though multiple people privately thought it was flawed. No one gave each other honest feedback about leadership weaknesses. No one surfaced the conflicts between departments that were creating dysfunction.

When I pointed this out, the CEO was defensive: “But we have high psychological safety. People tell us that all the time.” So I asked: “When was the last time someone disagreed with you in a meeting? When was the last time someone told you that one of your ideas wasn’t working? When was the last time you saw real conflict about strategy or approach?” Long silence. Then: “People don’t need to disagree if we’re aligned.” They weren’t aligned. They were silent. And silence that comes from comfort looks exactly like silence that comes from fear, until you create conditions where speaking up is possible and see whether anyone does.

Research by Morrison (2014) on employee voice demonstrates this exact pattern. Leaders often misinterpret silence as agreement when it’s actually fear, futility, or just wanting to avoid the discomfort of disagreement. A low voice can indicate high comfort (everyone agrees) or low psychological safety (no one dares disagree). Leaders need to test which one they have by explicitly inviting dissent and seeing whether anyone takes the risk.

That CEO eventually did test it. She started explicitly asking for disagreement: “Who sees this differently? What are we missing? What concerns do people have that we’re not voicing?” At first, nothing. The comfort culture was deeply established. But gradually, cautiously, people started to speak. And what emerged was a lot of discomfort. Disagreements that had been suppressed. Concerns that had been privately held. Tensions that had been avoided. It was not comfortable. But for the first time in years, it was actually psychologically safe.

The Role of STEADY in Creating Safety for Productive Conflict

This brings me to an important point about frameworks for difficult conversations. Real psychological safety doesn’t mean avoiding conflict. It means having the tools to navigate conflict without it becoming destructive. This is where STEADY, the de-escalation framework I developed for moments when emotions are high and conflict is present, becomes essential. STEADY isn’t about avoiding difficult conversations. It’s about making them possible.

When psychological safety is high, people will engage in productive conflict. But productive conflict still involves real emotions, real disagreement, real tension. And if leaders don’t know how to handle that, if they panic at the first sign of discomfort and try to smooth everything over, they inadvertently teach people that conflict is dangerous, which destroys the very safety they’re trying to build.

STEADY provides a way to stay engaged with conflict while preventing it from escalating into destruction:

Self-regulate first: You can’t facilitate productive conflict if you’re activated by the conflict yourself. Your discomfort with disagreement will telegraph to others that disagreement isn’t actually safe here.

Take in the environment: Sometimes conflict is productive and should be engaged. Sometimes the context isn’t right, and you need to redirect. Recognizing the difference is crucial.

Empathize without agreement: You can acknowledge that disagreement is uncomfortable for everyone involved without implying that the discomfort means something is wrong. “This is a hard conversation” is different from “we shouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Address the unmet need: Often, what looks like content conflict is actually a conflict over unmet needs for autonomy, respect, or being heard. When you address the need, the conflict becomes more productive.

De-escalate through co-regulation: Your steady presence in the face of conflict signals to others that conflict is safe here. Your comfort with discomfort creates space for others to stay engaged.

Yield time before solutions: Productive conflict doesn’t require immediate resolution. Sometimes, the most important thing is that the disagreement gets voiced, even if you’re not solving it today.

STEADY helps leaders create conditions where people can disagree, challenge, and engage in conflict while still feeling psychologically safe. Because psychological safety isn’t the absence of conflict, it’s the presence of enough trust to handle conflict productively.

What High Psychological Safety Actually Looks Like

What I see in organizations with genuinely high psychological safety is in contrast with what most people imagine is instructive. In a team meeting with high psychological safety, this includes a junior team member interrupting the senior leader mid-presentation: “Wait, I’m confused. That doesn’t match the data we reviewed last week. Can you explain the discrepancy?” The senior leader pauses, checks their notes, and says: “You’re right. I misremembered. Thanks for catching that. Let me pull up the actual numbers.” Another person jumps in: “Actually, I think we’re solving the wrong problem. I know we’ve spent three weeks on this approach, but I think we should reconsider whether this is the right direction at all.” There’s a moment of tension. People have invested time. But someone else says, “That’s uncomfortable to hear, but I’ve been wondering the same thing. Let’s talk about it.” They have a debate. It gets heated. People disagree strongly. At one point, someone says, “I’m getting activated. Can we take five minutes?” They do. They come back. They keep going.

By the end, they haven’t resolved everything, but they’ve surfaced real concerns, challenged assumptions, and engaged with disagreement. Multiple people leave feeling uncomfortable about the uncertainty, the conflict, and having their thinking challenged. No one leaves feeling unsafe.

In a feedback conversation with high psychological safety, a manager says to their direct report: “I need to give you some feedback that’s difficult. Your work on the last project wasn’t at the standard I know you’re capable of, and it created problems for the team.” The direct report feels the hit. It’s uncomfortable. But they also know this manager has given them regular positive feedback, has advocated for them, and is invested in their success. So instead of getting defensive, they say: “That’s hard to hear. Can you be specific about what didn’t meet the standard?” The manager gives examples. The direct report explains context. They disagree on some of the assessments. That disagreement is allowed. Eventually, they land on what needs to change and how the manager can support that. Neither person enjoyed the conversation. Both people left knowing that honesty is valued more than comfort here, which means they can trust feedback in both directions.

I also helped a team dealing with failure. A project failed. Publicly. Expensively. Everyone knew whose decision led to it. In a low psychological safety culture, that person would be blamed, possibly fired, definitely scapegoated. Everyone else would distance themselves. The conversation would be about punishment. In a high-psychological-safety culture, the team holds a meeting. The person whose decision led to the failure says, “This was my call, and it was wrong. Here’s what I thought would happen and what actually happened. I want to understand where my thinking went wrong so we can all learn from this.”

The conversation that follows was uncomfortable. People asked hard questions. They examined assumptions. They looked at what signals were missed. It was not fun for anyone, least of all the person who made the call. But the focus was on learning, not blame. On “how do we think better next time,” not “who do we punish.” The person wasn’t protected from discomfort or accountability. But they were protected from being treated as disposable because they made a mistake. That’s psychological safety. Uncomfortable as hell. And still safe.

The Standard We Should Actually Be Holding

I want to end with a challenge to how we think about psychological safety in organizations. The standard shouldn’t be: “Does everyone feel comfortable?” The standard should be: “Can people take interpersonal risks without being punished for it?”

I challenge you to think about your team:

• Can people disagree with authority without career consequences?
• Can people admit mistakes without being treated as incompetent?
• Can people ask questions without being seen as slow or difficult?
• Can people give each other honest feedback without damaging relationships?
• Can people engage in productive conflict without it becoming personal?
• Can people challenge the status quo without being marginalized?

If the answer to these questions is yes, you have psychological safety. Even if, especially if, people are frequently uncomfortable because they’re doing these difficult things.

If the answer is no, you don’t have psychological safety. Even if everyone is very comfortable because they’ve learned to avoid anything risky.

Psychological safety is not about protecting people from discomfort. It’s about protecting people from punishment when they do uncomfortable things in the service of better outcomes. It’s not about making work feel good. It’s about making it safe to tell the truth, even when the truth is hard.

It’s not about avoiding conflict. It’s about engaging conflict productively instead of destructively or not at all. It’s not about comfort. It’s about risk. If we keep confusing the two, we’ll keep building cultures where everyone is comfortable, no one is honest, and nothing actually gets better.

The most psychologically safe teams I’ve worked with are often the least comfortable. Because people are actually doing the hard things, disagreeing, challenging, admitting uncertainty, giving feedback, surfacing problems. That’s not comfortable. But it is safe. And that’s what makes excellence possible.

About the Author

Malynnda Stewart, PhD, BCPA, is a leading expert on regulated difficult conversations, integrating trauma-informed mediation, neuroscience-based feedback, and health communication. As a board-certified patient advocate, certified conflict mediator, and grief advocate, and as the CEO of Compassionate Navigation, LLC, she helps professionals navigate high-stakes dialogue by working with, rather than against, human biology. Creator of the Regulated Conversation Framework and BRIDGE Method, host of the Communication Compass podcast. Her work is grounded in courage, curiosity, and compassion.

Sources

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 741–749.

Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Strategies for learning from failure. Harvard Business Review, 89(4), 48–55.

Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right kind of wrong: The science of failing well. Atria Books.

Frazier, M. L., Fainshmidt, S., Klinger, R. L., Pezeshkan, A., & Vracheva, V. (2017). Psychological safety: A meta-analytic review and extension. Personnel Psychology, 70(1), 113–165.

Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173–197.

Further Reading

My Related Work:

• STEADY: When You Can’t Solve Problems with Dysregulated People
• What a Mediator Sees: How Avoiding Conflict Creates the Hostility You Fear
• Communication as Prevention: Why Psychological Safety Is Never ‘Done’

On Psychological Safety:

• The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson
• Think Again by Adam Grant
• The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle