What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Coined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson in 1999, it describes a climate where team members can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and propose ideas without fear of being punished or humiliated. Google's Project Aristotle identified it as the single most important factor in high-performing teams.

What is Edmondson's 7-item scale?

Amy Edmondson's 7-item psychological safety scale is a team-level assessment published in her 1999 Administrative Science Quarterly paper 'Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams'. It uses 7 statements rated on a 7-point Likert scale, with 3 items reverse-scored. It is the most widely cited measure of psychological safety and the instrument Google used in Project Aristotle.

Does ClarityLift read individual employee messages?

No. ClarityLift is aggregate team-level analysis only. It never identifies individuals, never reads individual messages, and requires a minimum team size of 10. When it detects low-safety signals in communication patterns, it reports them at the team level only.

Psychological Safety Assessment: Edmondson's 7-Item Scale

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