How How Safe Is My Team for Speaking Up? works

How it is scored

Psychological safety is a shared belief that a team is safe for taking risks such as speaking up, admitting mistakes, and asking for help (Edmondson, 1999). A large review linked it with more learning, more speaking up, and better performance (Frazier and others, 2017). Research on employee voice finds that people often stay silent because they expect speaking up to cost them, and that power makes this worse (Morrison, 2014; Detert and Edmondson, 2011). Groups that share talking time evenly also tend to do better (Woolley and others, 2010).

This test looks at five areas: speaking up, talking about mistakes, asking for help, disagreeing, and being heard and included. Each area has eight sentences. Half describe a safe team and half describe the opposite, so you cannot get a high score just by agreeing with everything. Each answer gives 0 to 4 points.

Each area score runs from 0 to 100, and a higher score means a team that feels safer to you. Your overall score is the average of the five areas. Scores are read as Low (0 to 33), Medium (34 to 66), or High (67 to 100). They describe your view, not a measured fact about the team.

PersonalitySite.com wrote all of these questions and descriptions. They are not copied from any other test.

What it cannot tell you

This test is based only on your view of your team. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a measure of a manager or a teammate. Do not use it to rate, rank, discipline, or judge anyone, or in a performance review. It has not been tested for those uses.

One person's view cannot tell you how the whole team feels. People with more power often feel safer than people with less, and people may answer differently depending on who might see their answers. Any team summary should only be shown when enough people have answered that no one can be identified.

This version has not yet been tested with a large group of people, so we do not yet know how accurate it is.

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