Measuring psychological safety: what the 7 items measure, and how to move the score
Everything you need to run Amy Edmondson's psychological safety survey: what each of the seven items measures, the scale and scoring, and how to read team results.
The Edmondson team psychological safety survey
The survey comes from Amy Edmondson's 1999 study of work teams and is the instrument behind The Fearless Organization Scan. The exact wording is in the paper. Each item is rated on a 7-point scale: 1 = strongly disagree, 4 = neither, 7 = strongly agree. Items 1, 3, and 5 are negatively worded and reverse-scored (a 2 counts as a 6) before averaging.
- Whether mistakes are held against people. reverse-scored
- Whether problems and hard issues can be raised inside the team.
- Whether people get rejected for being different. reverse-scored
- Whether taking a risk feels safe on this team.
- Whether asking teammates for help is difficult. reverse-scored
- Whether team members would deliberately undermine each other.
- Whether each person feels their distinct skills are recognized and put to use.
How to read the results
Three rules. No names attached, ever: a survey with names measures willingness to look safe, not safety. Team-level, per item: a team can score well on five items and badly on two; the two are your work. Discuss the spread: an average of 5 where half answered 7 and half answered 3 has a subgroup for whom the team is not safe.
Why a single measurement fails
The common failure mode: the survey runs once, the score lands in a slide deck, and nothing changes. That can make things worse: the survey is itself an act of speaking up, and if nothing visibly happens, the team just learned that speaking up changes nothing. Google's re:Work research found how the team works together mattered more than who was on it, with psychological safety as the foundation dynamic. The score is a trailing indicator: change practice and measure again.
How Aurora Coach addresses it
The survey names the problem; Aurora Coach works it through a continuous improvement loop in the Foundation domain (psychological safety, learning, purpose, autonomy), one of six domains alongside Product, Engineering, Operations, Workflow, and Alignment. The Edmondson survey is a point-in-time Sense reading; the loop makes improvement continuous and visible.
- Sense and Analyze Every team member contributes context. The pattern is inverted: the AI asks structured questions and the team responds, qualitative context plus quantitative signal from integrations such as Aurora Coach for GitHub. The AI synthesizes this into a SWOT and maturity assessment grounded in the team’s actual situation, combined with industry best practices and academic research.
- Recommend, Refine, Commit The AI recommends concrete next steps with rationale, implementation steps, and success criteria. Team members vote, and the team lead refines each suggestion to fit the team’s reality; the AI never decides. The team commits to specific improvements, owned by the team and tracked through periods. This visibility does its own work: watching a raised problem become a commitment is direct evidence that speaking up produces action.
- Execute and Re-evaluate The team does the work in its own context, alongside delivery. Next period’s analysis sees what changed, with progress visible against previous commitments. Re-run the seven items and compare; the loop continues and context compounds.
Run the survey itself with a form tool. Aurora Coach adds everything between measurements: free-text check-ins in the team's own words.
Example commitments
Not best practices, just examples of commitments a team might make:
- The leader asks for everyone else’s read before giving their own.
- Reviews and postmortems describe the system, never the person.
- Uncertain work is framed as a learning problem, with early bad news invited.
- Bad news gets a thank-you before it gets a fix discussion.
What do the 7 psychological safety survey items measure?
They are the seven survey items Amy Edmondson published in her 1999 study of work teams and later popularized in The Fearless Organization. The items probe mistakes, raising hard problems, being different, taking risks, asking for help, undermining, and whether individual skills are valued and used. Each is rated on a 7-point agree/disagree scale; items 1, 3, and 5 are negatively worded and reverse-scored. The exact wording is in Edmondson’s 1999 paper.
How do you measure psychological safety on a team?
Run the seven Edmondson items as a survey with no names attached, on the 7-point scale. Reverse-score items 1, 3, and 5, then look at team-level results per item. Anonymity is non-negotiable. And look at the spread, not just the mean.
Can you improve psychological safety directly?
No. The score is a trailing indicator of how the team behaves: what happens after a mistake, who talks first, what asking for help costs. Talking about the score does not move it; committing to a concrete practice change and re-measuring does.
The seven items are ready to run today; a free trial keeps the loop going between measurements, and MapROI (free, no signup, about 5 minutes) gives you a tailored ROI analysis for making it continuous.