Psychological Safety in Difficult Talks

A team can describe itself as psychologically safe and still have one conversation that nobody wants to start. The project is late. A workload problem has been obvious for weeks. Someone made a mistake that now needs to be named. A junior employee disagrees with a senior manager. Everybody may describe the culture as open in general and still decide that this particular thing is safer left unsaid.

New research from Germany and Austria helps explain why. Jens Hagelstein, Jeannine Huber, Ingrid Wahl and Sabine Einwiller interviewed 56 employees about concrete situations in which they had felt safe or unsafe to voice concerns. Their central finding is not that one communication channel or one leadership behaviour creates psychological safety everywhere. It is that the communication setting itself matters.

Who is speaking to whom, about what, in which format, with what tone and under what organisational conditions changes the perceived interpersonal risk. Psychological safety is often discussed as if it were an ambient property of a team, while the study suggests that employees experience it much more locally.

The same employee can feel safe in one conversation and silent in the next

The researchers identified settings that participants described as safer. Structured feedback formats, face-to-face dialogue, respectful and neutral tone, speaking with trusted people and having time to prepare all appeared in the interviews.

Other settings were repeatedly harder. Conversations about workload distribution and responsibility for mistakes were associated with lower perceived safety. Irony and heavy use of technical jargon could make matters worse. Organisational change also created uncertainty.

The study is qualitative, so it does not tell us that any one of these features will causally raise psychological safety in every workplace. The sample is also relatively small and drawn from Germany and Austria.

What it does show clearly is that employees do not experience "the culture" as one constant condition. A person can feel comfortable proposing an idea to a peer and unsafe challenging the same idea in front of a senior leader. They can speak openly about a process improvement and stay quiet about an overloaded colleague. They can trust their manager generally but hesitate when the subject is a mistake that reflects badly on the team. The conversation changes the risk.

Preparation was part of the safety equation

One finding is particularly relevant for capability building: employees reported feeling safer when they had been able to prepare for the conversation.

That does not mean organisations should make employees responsible for overcoming an unsafe environment through better rehearsal. If a leader punishes dissent, no amount of preparation fixes the underlying problem.

But preparation can change what happens inside a conversation that is difficult even in a healthy environment.

Someone raising a project risk may need to decide how to present evidence without sounding accusatory. A category manager may need to challenge an internal stakeholder who wants to accept a supplier increase immediately. A team member may need to say that the current workload is not feasible while making clear which trade-off is required. People often know what they want to say; the difficult part is producing it clearly when the other person reacts.

Leaders can overestimate how safe they are to challenge

A second study published in August makes the issue more uncomfortable for managers.

Phoebe Haemin Pahng, Ryan Fuller, Jin Sun Kwak and Sung Mo Kang analysed multi-source, multi-wave data from 496 employees and 139 leaders in South Korea. They examined whether leaders and employees agreed about the quality of their working relationship.

Greater alignment was associated with higher psychological safety. The lowest psychological safety appeared when leaders rated the relationship more positively than employees did. Psychological safety, in turn, predicted employee voice in the study.

The result does not prove that leader overconfidence directly causes silence, and the data comes from a South Korean sample. Still, the gap is easy to recognise: a leader knows their intention, "I want people to challenge me," while the employee evaluates a different question, "What happens when I actually do?" An open-door policy describes availability. Psychological safety is tested in the response to disagreement.

Difficult conversations expose the gap between policy and behaviour

Most organisations have language that encourages speaking up. Fewer have deliberately designed the moments in which speaking up is hardest. Procurement provides good examples: a buyer has to tell engineering that the requested specification is destroying competition. A category manager has to tell a business leader that a supplier escalation is credible. A junior buyer has to challenge a senior colleague's savings claim. A team member has to admit that the negotiation strategy is not working.

This is one reason workplace negotiation is broader than bargaining: many consequential negotiations happen inside organisations, where hierarchy and relationship risk are part of the substance.

None of these situations is solved by declaring that challenge is welcome.

The receiving side has to respond in a way that keeps challenge possible. The person raising the issue also needs enough skill to make the point clearly rather than hiding it inside hints, excessive qualification or a long preamble.

Psychological safety and communication skill are therefore related without being the same thing.

A safe culture cannot compensate for poor communication forever, and better communication cannot compensate for a punishing culture. The practical work sits in both.

Design the conversation, not only the culture statement

The two studies suggest several concrete questions for leaders and teams. Before a difficult discussion, is the setting appropriate for the issue? Does the person raising the concern have time to prepare? Is the audience larger than necessary? Is the conversation structured enough that challenge can be heard before the group rushes to a decision?

For leaders, there is an additional question: how would I know whether people actually experience me as safe to disagree with? The answer cannot come only from the leader's self-assessment. Patterns are more informative. Do people bring bad news early? Do they challenge assumptions before decisions are final? Can a junior person tell a senior person that a plan is unrealistic? After someone raises a concern, are they invited back into the work or quietly excluded from it? Psychological safety becomes visible in those repetitions.

Rehearsal can support the moment without pretending to solve the culture

Spoken practice has a legitimate role here. Rehearsal can help someone prepare the first sentence of an upward challenge, respond when the manager becomes defensive, distinguish evidence from accusation and repeat the conversation until the core message survives pressure.

It can also help leaders practise the receiving side: asking for evidence without punishing the messenger, slowing down before defending the decision, and showing that disagreement does not end the relationship.

That kind of practice does not manufacture psychological safety by itself. What it can do is make the behaviour required for psychologically safer conversations more available when the real moment arrives.

The research points toward a useful principle for professional learning: difficult conversations should not be treated as generic "soft skills." The topic, hierarchy, audience, preparation and expected response all change the task.

If organisations want more employee voice, they need more than an invitation to speak; they need conversations in which speaking actually works.

Sources

• Hagelstein, J., Huber, J., Wahl, I., & Einwiller, S. (2026). Psychological Safety and Internal Communication: Employees' Perceptions of Psychologically Safe Communication Settings in the Workplace. International Journal of Business Communication. First published online 7 August 2026.
• Pahng, P. H., Fuller, R., Kwak, J. S., & Kang, S. M. (2026). Same Playbook, Safer Plays: Leader-Member Alignment and Employee Voice. International Journal of Business Communication. First published online 26 August 2026.