Psychological Safety Survey Questions: 50 Examples

Good psychological safety survey questions describe a specific behavior, not a feeling. Ask whether people can raise tough issues, whether mistakes are held against them, and whether it is difficult to ask for help, then reverse-score the negatively worded items. Amy Edmondson's original scale does this in seven items; most workplace surveys extend it to twenty or thirty. Below are fifty examples you can use, grouped by what each one actually measures, plus the scoring and anonymity rules that decide whether the results mean anything.

Start with the original seven

Almost every psychological safety survey in circulation traces back to the seven-item scale Amy Edmondson published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1999. It is short, it has been validated across thousands of studies, and it is worth using as your spine before you add anything:

1. If I make a mistake on this team, it is often held against me. (reverse-scored)
2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different. (reverse-scored)
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help. (reverse-scored)
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

Three of the seven are worded negatively on purpose. That is not a quirk, it is a defense against acquiescence bias, the tendency to agree with whatever a survey says. If every item is positive, a respondent skimming down the page and ticking "agree" produces a perfect score that means nothing. Mixing the polarity forces people to read.

One thing to know before you copy it: the scale as published measures a defined team, and Edmondson's own commercial instrument, the Fearless Organization Scan, is licensed. Using the seven items internally for your own diagnostic is common practice, but if you are building something you intend to sell or publish, check the licensing.

Fifty psychological safety survey questions by category

Group your questions so the results point somewhere. A single blended score tells you safety is low; categorized items tell you it is low specifically around admitting error, which is a different fix from low safety around disagreeing with leadership.

Speaking up and raising problems (1 to 8)

1. I can raise a problem in this team without worrying about how it will be received.
2. When something is going wrong on a project, people here say so early.
3. Bad news travels up in this organization as fast as good news.
4. I have withheld a concern in the last three months because raising it did not feel worth the risk. (reverse)
5. People here can question the way things have always been done.
6. I know who to go to when I see something that is not right.
7. Concerns raised in this team get a response, even when the answer is no.
8. Speaking up here is treated as being difficult rather than being useful. (reverse)

Mistakes, failure, and blame (9 to 16)

9. When something goes wrong here, we focus on what caused it rather than who caused it.
10. I would feel comfortable telling my manager about a mistake I made.
11. People here hide small errors so they do not become a bigger issue for them. (reverse)
12. We talk openly about projects that failed and what we learned.
13. Admitting you do not know something is acceptable here.
14. Bringing up a problem that has no obvious solution is welcomed.
15. Post-mortems in this organization end in accountability rather than blame.
16. I have seen someone treated badly here for owning a mistake. (reverse)

Disagreement and challenging authority (17 to 24)

17. I can disagree with my manager without damaging the relationship.
18. Decisions here get real debate before they are made, not after.
19. Senior leaders here can be challenged in a meeting.
20. People agree in the room and then object afterward. (reverse)
21. When I have raised an objection, it changed the outcome at least once.
22. Dissent in this team is treated as loyalty rather than disloyalty.
23. The most senior person in the room usually speaks first and last. (reverse)
24. I would tell leadership something they clearly did not want to hear.

Asking for help and admitting limits (25 to 32)

25. Asking a colleague for help here is easy.
26. Asking for help would make me look less capable to my manager. (reverse)
27. People here offer help before they are asked.
28. I can say "I do not have the skills for this" without consequence.
29. New people here are comfortable asking basic questions.
30. I can push back on a deadline I know is unrealistic.
31. Saying no to extra work here is career-limiting. (reverse)
32. My manager notices when I am overloaded before I have to say so.

Inclusion and being valued (33 to 40)

33. My contributions are valued in this team.
34. Different opinions are genuinely welcome here.
35. Some people in this team are talked over more than others. (reverse)
36. People here are treated the same regardless of level or tenure.
37. I can be myself at work.
38. My ideas get attributed to me.
39. Quieter people in this team get heard.
40. Someone who disagrees with the majority here would be listened to.

Manager behavior (41 to 50)

41. My manager admits when they are wrong.
42. My manager asks for feedback on their own performance.
43. My manager responds well when I bring problems rather than solutions.
44. My manager gives credit publicly and criticism privately.
45. My manager reacts badly when a project slips. (reverse)
46. My manager makes space for people who have not spoken in a meeting.
47. My manager follows through on concerns I have raised.
48. I trust my manager with information that reflects poorly on me.
49. My manager holds the team to a high standard and treats people well doing it.
50. If my manager left tomorrow, my willingness to speak up would change. (reverse)

How to score the responses

Use a consistent agreement scale, either five or seven points. Edmondson's original uses seven. Five is easier for a general workforce and produces less noise. Whichever you pick, keep it the same every round, because changing the scale resets your trend line.

Reverse-score the negative items before you average anything. On a five-point scale, a reverse-scored item flips so that 1 becomes 5, 2 becomes 4, and so on. Skip this step and your negatively worded questions will drag a healthy team's score down and inflate an unhealthy one. It is the single most common error in homemade psychological safety surveys.

Then report by category, not just as one number. A team averaging 4.1 overall but 2.6 on "disagreement and challenging authority" has a specific, fixable problem with how leadership handles dissent. The blended 4.1 hides it completely.

The anonymity rule that decides everything

A psychological safety survey that people do not trust is worse than no survey. If respondents suspect their answers are traceable, the low-safety people, the ones you most need to hear from, will score themselves as safe. You will read a good number and conclude everything is fine, which is exactly the failure the survey exists to catch.

Three practical rules. Collect responses anonymously and say so in plain language before the first question. Never report a segment with fewer than five respondents, because a four-person team plus a demographic filter is not anonymous no matter what the tool promises. And do not ask managers to distribute or chase completions for their own teams, because the chasing itself signals surveillance. The same thresholds apply to any anonymous instrument, and dedicated employee survey software enforces the minimum-segment rule automatically rather than leaving it to whoever builds the report.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Asking once. A one-off score has no meaning without a comparison. The value is in the movement between rounds and against a benchmark.
• Rewording between rounds. Improving your question wording feels productive and destroys your trend data. Freeze the core items.
• Surveying without a follow-up plan. Asking people whether it is safe to speak up, then doing nothing visible with the answers, lowers safety. You have just demonstrated that speaking up changes nothing.
• Confusing safety with comfort. High psychological safety plus low standards produces a pleasant, unproductive team. Edmondson's own framing pairs safety with accountability, and your questions should not imply that a demanding environment is an unsafe one.
• Treating a low score as an HR problem. Silence is often structural. If flagging a defect means a week of rework nobody has time for, people stay quiet for entirely rational reasons and no amount of trust training fixes it.

What to do with a low score

Start with the category that scored lowest rather than the average. If the gap is around mistakes and blame, the fix is usually in how incidents are reviewed: a written blameless post-mortem format changes behavior faster than a values statement. If the gap is around disagreement, the fix sits with a small number of senior people and how they respond in meetings, which is coachable but only if someone tells them. If the gap is around asking for help or being heard, look at workload and meeting structure before you look at attitudes. A low safety score is rarely isolated either, so it is worth reading it beside a broader company culture survey to see whether candor is the only norm that has slipped.

One practical intervention that costs nothing: separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Much of the silence in meetings comes from people declining to voice a half-formed thought that will be judged immediately. Running the divergent part of the conversation as a structured session where you generate every option before anyone ranks them removes the interpersonal risk from the part of the process where risk-taking matters most.

From questions to a measured score

Question banks are the easy part. The hard part is running the same instrument consistently, keeping it anonymous, and having something to compare the result against so you know whether a score of 3.6 is a crisis or normal for your sector.

Assessmentcloud scores the organizational culture dimension, including candor and speak-up conditions, 0 to 100 against your industry median, and places it beside process maturity, skills, and compliance readiness so you can see whether silence is a culture problem or a rational response to a broken process. Run the psychological safety assessment to get the benchmarked score, and see the team effectiveness assessment for how safety sits alongside the other conditions that decide whether teams perform. For the models behind all of this, read our guide to the team effectiveness model. One honest boundary: this measures the organization-wide conditions, it is not Edmondson's licensed scale and it does not produce a clinical or psychosocial risk finding.

Frequently asked questions

What are good psychological safety survey questions?

Good psychological safety survey questions describe specific behavior rather than general feeling: whether people can raise problems and tough issues, whether mistakes are held against them, whether it is safe to take a risk, whether asking for help is difficult, and whether unique skills are valued. Include some negatively worded items and reverse-score them, keep the wording identical between rounds, and group questions by theme so a low score points at a cause.

How many questions should a psychological safety survey have?

Between seven and twenty-five for most organizations. Edmondson's validated scale is seven items, which is enough for a reliable score and short enough that people finish it. Beyond about twenty-five, completion rates fall and the extra precision is rarely worth it. If you want more depth, add questions to one category you care about rather than lengthening every section evenly.

How do you measure psychological safety anonymously?

Use a tool that does not attach identity to responses, state the anonymity guarantee in plain language before the first question, and set a minimum reporting threshold so no segment with fewer than five respondents is ever shown. Do not let managers distribute or chase completions for their own teams. If people doubt the anonymity, the low-safety respondents will score themselves as safe and the survey will report the opposite of the truth.

What is a good psychological safety score?

Judge it against a benchmark and a trend rather than an absolute number. A raw average means little on its own; sitting well below the median for your industry, or dropping sharply after a reorganization, is a real finding. Assessmentcloud reports culture on a 0 to 100 scale against the industry median for exactly this reason, because the gap and the direction carry the information, not the raw figure.

Can you measure psychological safety across a whole company?

Yes, though it measures something slightly different. Team-level instruments capture the dynamics inside one intact team, which is where psychological safety was originally defined. An organization-wide measure captures whether the company as a whole is safe enough to hear bad news, which is what leadership needs to know before a compliance gap or a failing program reaches them late. Both are valid; run the team version to fix one team and the organizational version to see systemic risk.