At The Fearless Organization Scan, we build on the work of Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson, whose academic research laid the foundation for understanding psychological safety in teams.
We offer validated scans that help organizations understand how psychological safety is experienced in real time - across teams, roles, and levels.
Our tools help turn the insights from studies into actionable, measurable improvements.
-
About Psychological Safety
-
Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Psychological safety enables individuals and teams to engage in open conversations, take interpersonal risks, and learn from failures without fear.
Amy C. Edmondson's seminal 1999 research on hospital teams linked psychological safety to fewer medical errors, and Google’s 2014 Project Aristotle reinforced psychological safety as the top factor determining team effectiveness. This finding has been consistently validated by MIT, Singapore Management University, and dozens of other reputable institutions.
What psychological safety is NOT:
- Being nice
- Being comfortable
- Lowering performance standards
Psychological safety can be built via good management - managers who are good coaches and people developers; who communicate clearly and listen extremely well, and are savvy enough not to respond with anger to bad news or dissenting views.
-
Psychological safety is vital to quality, innovation, and performance in any work environment that depends at all on problem solving, communication, collaboration, or experimentation.
Psychological safety is far less important in extremely routine or modular tasks - it still helps performance but the effect size is smaller.
-
In fast-changing, knowledge-based environments, teams need to learn continuously and adapt quickly. Without psychological safety, people hold back - innovation slows, inclusion suffers, and mistakes go unspoken.
-
-
Psychological Safety in Your Team
-
The Team Psychological Safety Index is a validated measurement tool that captures the level of psychological safety as experienced by the team.
It includes two parts:
-
The overall PSI score - a single, evidence-based index that reflects the team’s aggregate experience of psychological safety.
-
Four underlying domains - these provide a breakdown of scores across the key behavioral dimensions that influence psychological safety:
This combination of a clear index score and domain-specific insights allows teams and organizations to understand the current state of psychological safety, identify patterns, and guide focused improvements.
-
-
The team survey takes around 3 minutes to complete. The results are compiled into a clear, team-level report.
-
-
Psychological Safety in Your Organization
-
Yes. The Personal Psychological Safety Index (Personal PSI), the Team PSI and the Organization PSI are all grounded in the research of Professor Amy C. Edmondson and have been validated in practice across diverse industries and regions.
-
Surveys can be tailored by:
- region
- department
- tenure
- generation
- or any demographic relevant to your goals
You can provide this information to us, or we can add questions to the end of the survey. -
Participation in the benchmark survey The Fearless Report is completely free. There are added costs if you would like to customize the demographics or engage in further support. Reach out to us to speak further.
-
The Organization Psychological Safety Index enables organizations to measure psychological safety at scale.
There are two ways to participate:- Use the Custom Organization PSI Solution – Retain full ownership of your data, and expand your insights with customized segmentation and reporting. Ideal for organizations that want to embed psychological safety into broader strategies for culture, learning, or leadership.
-
Join the Global Benchmark (free) – Your anonymized data contributes to the global benchmark for psychological safety. In return, you receive a customized report and can benchmark your organization against industry, country, and global standards.
-
The Organization PSI survey takes around 6 minutes to complete. The survey can become slightly longer depending on the amount of additional demographic questions that are added by your organization.
-
Psychological safety is a health factor that should be on the mind of every organization. Measuring regularly is indeed best practice. What we see organizations do is measure this annually or biannually.
What is very important is that it does not become a KPI itself. It should be used as a conversation starter with different teams / leaders. The moment this becomes part of the overall performance metric for a leader / team, 'it' becomes the focus, rather than conversations that matter and the real outcomes (business success, innovation success, low sick leave and employee turnover).
-
-
About The Fearless Report
-
At both levels. The survey captures how participants experience psychological safety within their primary team, as well as the broader climate across the organization as a whole.
-
Your organization receives a custom report - the Organization Psychological Safety Index - that shows where psychological safety is strong and where there is room to grow. The results are yours to use: to start internal conversations, inform leadership decisions, or benchmark against your own future measurements.
Participating organizations also contribute anonymized data to the global Fearless Report 2026 dataset. -
The participation window is open through December 2026. Once your organization registers, you set your own internal timeline. Most organizations run their survey over two to three weeks. Your report is delivered within two weeks of your internal close date.
-
Yes. Once your survey is live, you will receive regular updates on your organization's overall response rate. Individual responses are never visible - only aggregate participation data.
-
Baseline Fearless Report participation is free. Optional upgrades and private Organization Psychological Safety Index are paid.
-
It’s delivered with your custom report once you meet the response threshold.