Explaining Terms
Psychological safety
As Amy Edmondson has explained, psychological safety occurs when team members feel confident to ask questions, offer ideas, express concerns and draw attention to mistakes without fear of repercussion. It creates a safe space for team members where human error is viewed as a means to learn and improve.
Research shows that when all team members feel safe to take risks by making suggestions, innovation is more likely to happen and workers feel more engaged. The teams who admit and learn from their mistakes are also more productive. Studies also show that psychological safety can particularly benefit women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ employees as well as those with disabilities or from less advantaged communities. All workers who feel psychologically safe are less likely to be off sick or leave their job because they feel more included and confident.
Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is when we combine emotion and reason in equal measures (Evans, 2019). Applying emotional intelligence makes it easier for us to understand other people’s emotions. This also applies to the world of work where managing our own emotions and understanding how others might be feeling can help make happier and more productive workplaces.
Emotional intelligence in the workplace recognises that people are at the centre of organisations – in fact people ARE the organisation. Where there are people, there are emotions because this is how we engage with each other. This means that organisations – their activities, decisions, and staff relationships – are shaped by people’s emotions. An emotionally literate organisation recognises this and works to foster the benefits it can bring to working and business practice. (Fineman, 2003)
Peer support
Peer support seeks to bring together people with similar experiences and creates a safe space where they can share stories in a community of acceptance and understanding. An important element of this community is the giving and receiving of support and the recognition that everyone has something of equal value to contribute.
Psychological safety, emotional intelligence and peer support combine together to ensure that teams cooperate to achieve a common goal rather than as individuals working to protect themselves.
Cooperative learning
This form of learning encourages collaboration, co-creation and peer support to achieve learning goals. It is underpinned by principles such as self help, self responsibility, democracy and caring for others. Cooperative learning fosters psychological safety by making space for belonging, valuing the contribution of every learner and encouraging diverse thinking, creativity and innovation. It sits at heart of Hf@W project and the courses it will deliver.
Some handy resources
- Timothy Clark, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2020). See also this interview with Timothy Clark about the ‘4 Stages’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMhHhXA8nB4
- Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley, 2025).
- Dylan Evans, Emotion: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- Stephen Fineman, Understanding Emotion at Work (Sage Publications, 2003). He has written a variety of useful sources about emotion and the workplace: https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/persons/stephen-fineman/publications/
- Leadership Trust, ‘Emotional Intelligence: Leading with Emotional Agility’, https://leadershiptrust.co/leading-with-emotional-agility/ (2024).
- Side by Side Research Consortium, Developing Peer Support in the Community: A Toolkit (Mind, 2017)