^{Work takes up most of our waking hours, so getting it right matters. I'm Clif P Lewis, an organisational psychologist, and I write about what the research says makes work work.}

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At the time of writing this article, if you write into the Google search bar “stop trying to”, autocomplete will suggest the iconic exchange between Gretchen and Regina in the movie Mean Girls, pictured below. 

Regina won that round, but in the real world fetch happened anyway, because slang belongs to whoever uses it. Scientific terms don’t. A few years ago, I was on a panel about employee wellbeing with fellow psychologists and business leaders, and when the topic of psychological safety came up I referred to Amy Edmondson’s definition. One of the business leaders replied, “Well, what psychological safety means to me is…”, and I honestly can’t tell you how that sentence ended, because I think I had a rage blackout.

Psychologist Nick Haslam calls this concept creep. He argued that psychology’s concepts of harm, such as trauma, bullying, addiction and mental disorder, have stretched in two directions (Haslam, 2016). They spread horizontally to new kinds of experience and vertically to milder ones. Analyses of psychology article abstracts from 1970 to 2017 confirm this trend, and Haslam argues the stretched meanings then spread into everyday talk (Vylomova & Haslam, 2021). He is fair in his critique, acknowledging that creep has also helped people recognise harms that were once ignored (Haslam et al., 2020). However, the trouble starts when a label spreads and leaves its definition behind.

I’d argue psychological safety is a textbook case of horizontal creep. Edmondson defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” and said it means “neither a careless sense of permissiveness, nor an unrelentingly positive affect” (Edmondson, 1999, pp. 350, 354). It belongs to the team, and it predicts learning behaviour, which in turn predicts performance (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023). Everyday use has stretched it towards niceness, the first of six misconceptions Edmondson now lists (Edmondson & Kerrissey, 2025).

Burnout shows the vertical kind of concept creep. It is a syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy caused by chronic workplace stress that has not been managed (World Health Organization [WHO], 2019), yet “I’m so burnt out” is commonly used to refer to having an isolated long week. Maslach and Leiter themselves warn against attempts to redefine burnout as simply exhaustion (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).

The original definition is what makes the concept useful. Edmondson’s seven-item psychological safety scale lets you compare teams and track one over time, which is how researchers found that newcomers start out with more psychological safety than their longer-serving colleagues and then lose it (Bransby et al., 2025). A personal definition can’t be used to measure, understand or improve organisational phenomena. Though it should be acknowledged that concepts such as psychological safety (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023) and burnout (Schaufeli et al., 2020) do evolve, but through evidence and debate among researchers, not through what a term means to one person.

You don’t have to be an academic or a psychologist to use these terms correctly. Wikipedia’s definitions are mostly accurate and up to date, and studies of its reliability largely agree, outside health topics at least (Mesgari et al., 2015) (If you’re one of my students, this is not permission to cite Wikipedia!). Let us know if you’d like me to cover engagement, resilience, impostor syndrome or the other usual suspects. Until then, stop trying to make your own definition of psychological safety happen. It’s not going to happen.

Stay human,
Clif

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