The Manager?s Guide to Psychological Safety

The Manager’s Guide to Psychological Safety presents a simple and easy-to-understand way to achieve psychological safety in organizations. Psychological safety is an organizational culture where no one will be punished for asking questions, speaking their minds, reporting mistakes and talking about them, and expressing concerns or proposing new ideas without being asked.

While relevant topics such as change, communication, motivation, and safety are covered, the concern is with the people in organizations—assuring that they are treated with dignity and respect for the benefit of all thus creating for them a psychologically safe place in which to work.

Approaches to achieving psychological safety are presented and present a unique framework (V-REEL®) for analyzing the organization and its internal environment that may hinder or help it become psychologically safe. Psychological safety, once attained, enhances the organization's reputation and its bottom line.

David D. Van Fleet is a Professor Emeritus of management at the Morrison School of Agribusiness, W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He is a past editor of both the Journal of Management and the Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management. He is or has been a member of the Board of Governors, Academy of Management, Southwest Federation of Academic Disciplines, and the Southern Management Association; and was national chair of the Management History Division of the Academy of Management. He is a fellow of both the Academy of Management and the Southern Management Association. He has been listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and Who's Who in Agriculture Academia. He has over 300 publications and presentations including 10 books (two with Information Age Publishing) and several websites for students. He has over 50 years of full-time teaching at four universities.