Unlocking Team Potential Through Psychological Safety in Veterinary Settings
Find out from Dr Petra Agthe what psychological safety is, and how it can improve veterinary team performance and wellbeing, and enhance patient care.
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Psychological safety has become a widely discussed concept and somewhat of a buzzword in recent years. However, it is complex and can be easily misunderstood. Many assume that psychological safety is simply about being “nice” or creating a comfortable workplace. In reality, it is far deeper, and its impact on outcomes such as team cohesion, patient safety, client satisfaction, and workplace wellbeing can be profound.
What Is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety can be defined in different ways, but perhaps the most widely accepted definition comes from organisational researcher Amy Edmondson, who defines psychological safety as:
‘the shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking’.
In practice, this means team members feel able to engage in behaviours such as:
- Speaking up with concerns
- Asking questions
- Requesting help
- Offering ideas
- Sharing feelings or needs relating to their work
- Flagging risks or issues affecting patient care
These acts all involve voluntary vulnerability — putting your internal thoughts “out there” not knowing how they will be received. When this vulnerability is consistently well-received, respected, and rewarded, team members learn that speaking up is safe. Punishing or ignoring these behaviours tends to have the opposite effect and will make it more likely that team members will remain silent.
Because there will never be a 100% guarantee of a constructive response, human interactions always carry at least a theoretical inherent risk and may therefore feel uncomfortable in some situations. This is why psychological safety is not about comfort. It is about creating an environment that feels ‘safe enough’ to engage in an interaction with others, even when it feels uncomfortable, and trusting that other team members will respond constructively.
What makes psychological safety so important?
In a nutshell, psychological safety facilitates collaboration and learning within teams. It ensures that, rather than worrying about how interactions may go, team members can be confident that they can work through challenges together.
This can be easily illustrated by thinking about what happens when psychological safety is low. In these cases, interpersonal interactions may be associated with fear of humiliation or retaliation, which may trigger the body’s fight–flight–freeze–fawn response. This narrows attention, impairs decision-making, reduces cognitive bandwidth, and reduces willingness to collaborate. Emotional responses like fear, worry, humiliation, and shame can follow, all of which erode confidence and willingness to speak up in the future. When this happens, team collaboration suffers, creativity and innovative thinking drop, and mistakes become more likely. Low psychological safety is therefore associated with lower patient safety, reduced efficiency, lower staff wellbeing and retention, and poorer financial outcomes.
There is a lot at stake — clinically, emotionally, and organisationally.
Who is responsible for psychological safety?
One of the most important messages is that psychological safety is everybody’s responsibility. While individuals in formal leadership roles or positions of power tend to have the most significant influence, everybody in the team has an impact on team culture. This means that we all have a part to play.
So, What Can Teams and Organisations Do?
There are many different things that can help to increase psychological safety. Raising awareness about its important role is a good start.
Other steps include:
• Recognising power gradients and noticing who speaks up, who doesn’t, and why. Encouraging questions, concerns, and ideas — especially from quieter or less confident colleagues, by those lower in the formal and informal hierarchy, and those who may feel marginalised.
• Establishing team charters and social contracts, and having conversations about them, for example, by asking:
o Which behaviours would we like to see?
o What isn’t acceptable
o How do we navigate different communication styles, preferences, and needs
o How does respectful disagreement look like
• As psychological safety is everybody’s responsibility, we all have an opportunity to contribute to our team culture through daily micro-behaviours. This includes how we respond to mistakes. Understanding that mistakes are learning opportunities and responding to them in constructive ways enables honest conversations that will help to reduce mistakes in the long run.
The Bottom Line
Psychological safety isn’t a “nice-to-have”; it’s the foundation of effective teams, safe patient care, and a thriving work environment. We all have a role in shaping cultures where interpersonal risk-taking is rewarded and voices are valued. Such environments don’t happen by accident — they are built intentionally, one interaction at a time.
Our next Psychological Safety Masterclass is now available to book, beginning in February 2026. Places are limited to 15 people - find out more and book your place here
References and further reading:
Brown, W., Santhosh, L., Stewart, N. H., Adamson, R., & Lee, M. M. (2024). The ABCs of Cultivating Psychological Safety for Clinical Learner Growth. Journal of graduate medical education, 16(2), 124–127.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
Edmondson, A. (2018). The fearless organization. John Wiley & Sons.
