# Amy Edmondson Amy Edmondson is Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, and the primary researcher behind the concept of psychological safety in team learning. Her 1999 paper — "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" — is the foundational empirical study from which the broader conversation about safety in organisations grew. ## Core contributions **Psychological safety as a team phenomenon.** Edmondson's original finding was counterintuitive: the best-performing medical teams reported *more* errors, not fewer. The explanation: they were psychologically safe enough to report errors. Safety was not the absence of mistakes; it was the condition under which mistakes were visible rather than hidden. **The interpersonal risk calculation.** People in teams are continuously, mostly unconsciously, asking: is it safe to say this? What is the cost of being wrong, of being judged, of disrupting the dynamic? In low-safety environments, the cost is high enough that people routinely withhold what they know. Edmondson's work quantifies the organisational cost of this withholding. **Failure typology.** Edmondson distinguishes preventable, complex, and intelligent failure — see [[Failure Typology — Edmondson]]. The practical value: only preventable failures warrant blame. Complex and intelligent failures are information sources. Most organisations treat all three as the same, which produces silence about the kinds of failure most worth learning from. **Teaming.** In *Teaming* (2012), Edmondson extends the argument: in a world where teams are temporary and constantly reforming, psychological safety can't be a fixed property of a stable team. It must be actively created in every collaboration — which means it is a skill, not a background condition. ## Key works - "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" (1999) — the original paper - *The Fearless Organization* (2018) — the practitioner-facing synthesis - *Teaming* (2012) — psychological safety in dynamic team contexts - *Right Kind of Wrong* (2023) — the failure typology extended ## See Also - [[Psychological Safety Map]] — the Owlery cluster her work anchors - [[Failure Typology — Edmondson]] — the most practically useful sub-concept - [[Fear Is the Enemy of Learning]] — the individual-level version of the same argument - [[Safety Culture vs Fear Culture]] — the organisational-level version - [[Boeing — Cost of Silence]] — a case study she has written about - [[References Backbone Map]] — the Owlery map that indexes this work by cluster