Psychological Safety Looks Different Depending on Where You're Standing

This is the second piece in a short series on psychological safety — what it really is, and what gets in the way of building it.

 

Last week, I wrote about superficial psychological safety ... how most teams have a version that works fine in calm conditions but collapses the moment the going gets tough. The response to that article got me thinking about a dimension I deliberately held back, because I think it deserves its own space.

Here it is: the way we talk about psychological safety in leadership development is almost entirely built on Western assumptions ... and this is rarely mentioned.

That matters ... especially for those of us working across global organisations, culturally diverse teams, or anywhere the workforce doesn't share a single cultural frame of reference.

 

Where the frameworks come from

Amy Edmondson's foundational research was conducted in the US. Dr Timothy Clark's four stages framework emerged from a Western organisational context. The Google Project Aristotle research ... probably the most cited evidence base for why psychological safety matters ... was conducted inside a single American technology company.

None of this diminishes the quality or value of the work. But it does mean the behavioural markers used to define and measure safety, such as speaking up in meetings, challenging authority, admitting mistakes publicly, voicing dissent, are expressions of a particular cultural logic. One where individual voice is valued, hierarchy is relatively flat, and direct communication is the norm.

That is not a universal baseline.

 

 

Power distance: the dimension that changes everything

One of the most practically useful lenses for understanding this comes from Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher who spent decades studying how cultural values shape behaviour at work. One of his key findings was that societies differ enormously in how they relate to hierarchy, specifically, how much inequality of power people expect, accept, and consider normal. He called this Power Distance, and he measured it on a scale of 0 to 100.

The differences are striking. China scores 80, meaning people broadly accept that power sits at the top and flows downward, that those with authority are not expected to explain themselves, and that challenging a superior is simply not what you do. India scores similarly, at 77. The UK scores 35, the USA at 40 ... both reflecting cultures where hierarchy exists but is less rigid, where people expect to have a voice, and where questioning those in authority is more socially acceptable.

What this means in practice is that the very behaviours we use to signal psychological safety in Western workplaces ... speaking up in a group, pushing back on a manager's idea, admitting a mistake publicly ... are not culturally neutral acts. In a high power distance culture, they can feel not just risky but socially wrong.

Negative feedback is not passed upward ... not primarily because people are afraid in the way a Western employee might be afraid, but because doing so violates a deeply held social norm around respect, seniority, and hierarchy.

What someone from the UK may read as "low psychological safety" may be a team functioning entirely coherently within its own cultural frame.

This is what I have experienced in my years of working across many cultures, and I was reminded again when working with a global leadership team helping them make sense of what psychological safety looked like for them as a team. Applying the same psychological safety frameworks across a global organisation, applying the same measurement tools, the same training programmes, the same behavioural expectations, without asking whether those tools were built for the culture they're now being used in, just won't work.

 

What this looks like in practice

During my time of working within Japanese firms, I learnt that the concept of wa (harmony) creates strong implicit pressure to avoid direct challenge, particularly of those in authority. Age-based hierarchy is deeply embedded; the expectation is that those with seniority lead and others follow. Research into psychosocial safety climate in Japanese workplaces has found that scores are significantly lower than benchmarks in other countries. However, the causes are structural and cultural, not simply a failure of individual leaders to invite the sharing of different perspectives and challenge. Embedding formal speak-up systems, reducing age-based hierarchy in structured ways, and helping leaders become more personally known to their teams have all shown a bigger impact than simply telling people it's "safe to challenge."

In Chinese organisational contexts, the concept of guanxi (the network of relationships and obligations that governs professional life) shapes how trust, loyalty, and safety are built and expressed. Relationship management often takes precedence over performance management. Safety may need to be earned through demonstrated loyalty and consistency within the relational network, not through an open-door policy.

In many South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African workplace cultures, collective identity and group loyalty are central to how people experience belonging and security. The Western emphasis on individual voice, "you should feel safe to speak as an individual", can sit uneasily alongside cultural values that locate safety in the group, not the person.

 

The binary doesn't hold

It's tempting to simplify this into East versus West, collectivist versus individualist. But the data is more complicated than that.

A 2025 University of Sussex study analysing data from 102 countries found that Japan and the United States differ by only 2.2 points on a 100-point individualism scale. Prosperous East Asian societies like South Korea and Taiwan have moved significantly toward individualism alongside economic development. The world's most collectivist societies are now found not in East Asia but in parts of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia ... Bangladesh, Egypt, and Myanmar ranking among the most collectivist in the study.

Cultural values are also not static. They shift with economic development, urbanisation, generational change, and global exposure. The person in your team who grew up in Shanghai, studied in London, and has worked internationally for a decade does not map neatly onto Hofstede's 1970s IBM data.

What this means practically is that we can't use cultural background as a proxy for individual orientation. But we can use cultural frameworks to ask better questions and design more adaptive approaches.

 

What genuine cultural adaptation looks like

Rather than asking "how do we get everyone to speak up in the way our framework expects," there are more useful questions we explore with leaders across the world when helping them think through their next steps:

What does safety actually feel like in this cultural context?

In some cultures it's the confidence to dissent publicly. In others it's the assurance that you won't be singled out, that the group will be treated fairly. These are different experiences of safety ... not different levels of it.

Are our channels for honest input culturally accessible?

If the only route for raising concerns is verbal, public, and hierarchically unconstrained, we are prioritising one cultural mode of expression. Anonymous feedback mechanisms, one-to-one relationships with people we trust, and structured consultation processes may reach people that more open methods of challenge never will.

What are we measuring, and what does the measure assume?

Most psychological safety surveys ask versions of Edmondson's original seven-item scale, developed in an American context. If the items presuppose that speaking up is the behaviour that signals safety, they will systematically undercount safety in cultures where safety is expressed differently. The measure isn't neutral.

Are we confusing difference with deficit?

Silence in a meeting is not always fear. Deference is not always compliance. Harmony is not always avoidance. Anyone who arrives with a Western focused framework and interprets cultural difference as a problem to fix is likely to cause harm while honestly believing they're helping.

 

The practical ask

If you work across cultures, and most of us working in cultural change do, I'd encourage you to consider the following three points:

1. Be transparent about where the frameworks you are using come from. Naming the Western origin of psychological safety concepts isn't a criticism of those concepts. It's intellectual honesty that opens the door to genuine adaptation and discussion about what works well in different cultural settings.
2. Build cultural curiosity into the diagnostic phase. Before designing any intervention around psychological safety, spend time understanding how trust, hierarchy, using your voice, and belonging are understood and expressed in the specific cultural context you're working in. Not as a one-time exercise but as an ongoing discipline.
3. Hold the aspiration but adapt the expression appropriately. The aspiration that people can contribute honestly, learn from mistakes, and challenge what isn't working is, I believe, genuinely universal (some may even call that a process of continuous improvement). The expression of that aspiration, the actions and behaviours to deliver this, are not universal.

 

A final thought

In my first article on this topic, I wrote that superficial psychological safety is fine-weather safety ... it works until it's tested. Cultural superficiality in safety work is a related problem. We can create interventions that look inclusive, feel progressive, and measure well ... and still be entirely disconnected from the lived experience of a significant portion of the people they're designed to reach and engage.

The aspiration may be universal. The expression is not. And closing that gap is where the real work is needed.

 

Authored by: Charlotte Sweeney OBE

 

This is the second piece in a short series on psychological safety — what it really is, and what gets in the way of building it. If you missed the previous articles on how psychological safety looks different across global cultures, as well as superficial psychological safety, you can read them here: 

 

Part 1: You Don't Have Psychological Safety. You Have the Rehearsed Version.  What really happens to psychological safety when the pressure hits? Most teams discover it was only ever performative.

Part 3: You Can't Build Real Psychological Safety Without Conflict. Here's Why That Matters. Charlotte challenges a common myth: psychological safety isn’t the absence of conflict; it’s the ability to work through it without losing trust

 

 

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References and further reading

On culture, power distance, and cross-cultural safety

- Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Sage Publications.

- Dollard, M. et al. (2023). Psychosocial Safety Climate in Japanese Workplaces. Journal of Occupational Health. https://academic.oup.com/joh/article/65/1/e12430/7479284

- GLOBIS Insights. 6 Ways Japan Can Create Psychological Safety in the Workplace. https://globisinsights.com/leadership/management/psychological-safety-japan/

- University of Sussex (2025). New Global Study Debunks East vs West Cultural Stereotypes. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/69651

- ScienceDirect Topics: Power Distance (Hofstede framework overview). https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/power-distance

 

Foundational frameworks referenced

- Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

- Clark, T.R. (2020). The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation. Berrett-Koehler.