← TERMS

Psychological Safety

Conditions where people can speak work-relevant truth without fear of retaliation

Psychological safety is the condition where people can raise work-relevant concerns — uncertainty, error, harm, dissent — without punishment for vulnerability.

Canonical value: Psychological Safety (adopted).

In this corpus, safety is structural: contestability, anti-retaliation, honoured supersession — not slogans (speak-up theatre). Enables epistemic humility and counters organisational toxicity.

Not conflict avoidance; not immunity from accountability. Bad-faith abuse of process is distinct from good-faith contest.

Corpus stance

A1 — adopted on this site: Design requirement for judgment infrastructure; complements Edmondson’s team-level research with L0 contest discipline.