Picture a tightrope walker. Arms steady, eyes fixed ahead, each step calculated. To lean too far in either direction means losing balance and falling.
For leaders and organisations striving for high performance, the tightrope isn’t made of rope, but of culture. At one end, psychological safety. At the other, accountability. The challenge isn’t choosing one over the other, but learning to walk the line between them.
Organisations today speak fluently about the need for high-performing teams. They seek innovation, resilience, and engagement. Yet beneath these ambitions lies a cultural paradox that many fail to resolve: how to foster an environment where individuals feel safe to speak, challenge, and fail, while still holding them to meaningful standards of performance.
In theory, psychological safety and accountability should be allies. In practice, they are often seen as competing forces. Leaders may worry that too much psychological safety leads to softness, while overemphasis on accountability risks fear and silence. This perceived trade-off has shaped the cultures of many teams – for better or worse.
This article explores that tension through the lens of organisational psychology. Drawing on research, personality theory, and case examples, we’ll examine what it really means to create cultures that are both safe and stretching.
Defining the Poles: Psychological Safety and Accountability
Psychological safety, as defined by Amy Edmondson (1999), is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It is not about being nice, nor is it about lowering standards. Rather, it is the confidence that speaking up, admitting mistakes, or challenging ideas won’t result in embarrassment or retribution.
Google’s Project Aristotle, a multi-year research study on team effectiveness, famously identified psychological safety to be the single most important factor in high-performing teams. But it did not suggest safety alone was sufficient. Clarity of roles, dependability, and meaning also mattered – all elements closely tied to accountability.
Accountability is about ownership of outcomes and clarity of expectations. It signals that performance matters, that people are relied upon, and that excellence is non-negotiable.
These concepts are often misrepresented as a zero-sum game: focusing on one comes at the expense of the other. Edmondson’s (2019) own framework presents a useful way to visualise their interaction. By mapping psychological safety and accountability on two axes, four team archetypes emerge:
- Apathy Zone: low safety, low accountability
- Comfort Zone: high safety, low accountability
- Anxiety Zone: low safety, high accountability
- Learning Zone: high safety, high accountability
High-performing teams sit firmly in the learning zone. They encourage candour and dissent, while also upholding standards and taking responsibility. Crucially, this balance is not accidental. It is designed and maintained through conscious cultural practice.
The False Dichotomy: Safety or Standards?
Many leaders and organisations frame psychological safety and accountability as mutually exclusive. A focus on safety is sometimes perceived as an indulgence, a slide into low challenge and permissiveness. Meanwhile, accountability can be weaponised, breeding fear, defensiveness, and burnout. In reality, the tension is not between opposites, but between different forms of clarity.
Psychological safety provides clarity about emotional and interpersonal risk. Accountability provides clarity about task and performance expectations. When one is absent, the other often becomes distorted.
For example, when accountability is high but safety is low (the anxiety zone), people may comply, but they rarely commit. They learn to avoid blame rather than seek solutions. Conversely, in high-safety, low-accountability cultures (the comfort zone), a lack of challenge can stifle growth and drift into complacency.
McClelland’s (1987) Theory of Needs offers further insight. Teams driven primarily by the need for affiliation may prioritise harmony over performance. Those driven by the need for achievement may push for results at the expense of trust. Balancing these motivational forces requires emotional intelligence and cultural self-awareness.
Personality and Perception: Why the Balance Feels Different
While the framework is useful, its real-world application is complicated by individual differences. Personality traits shape how people interpret both safety and accountability.
For example, individuals high in neuroticism may perceive constructive feedback as threatening, even in psychologically safe environments. Those high in conscientiousness often respond positively to accountability structures, seeing them as aligned with their intrinsic motivation for order and reliability. People high in agreeableness may avoid conflict, giving a false impression of harmony while suppressing dissent.
Other traits offer additional nuance. Extraverts may experience open challenge as energising, while introverts may prefer reflective channels for voicing disagreement. Those high in openness to experience tend to embrace ambiguity and feedback, whereas low-openness individuals may resist shifting expectations, seeing them as destabilising.
Self-efficacy also plays a key role. Bandura’s (1997) work highlights that individuals with a strong belief in their ability to influence outcomes are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviour. In contrast, those with low self-efficacy may withdraw or conform, regardless of the safety signals present.
Similarly, a person’s locus of control – whether they believe outcomes are shaped internally or by external forces – influences how they respond to expectations. Internally driven individuals may thrive under accountability, while externally driven ones may feel pressure or disengagement.
Understanding these psychological nuances allows leaders to move beyond one-size-fits-all interventions. The same message of accountability may inspire one team member and silence another.
Culture, then, is not a fixed setting but an adaptive system shaped by the personalities within it. We might then describe culture as the personality and the personalities of the group.
Tensions in Practice: Case Examples
Consider the manager who prides themselves on being “radically candid”. Their intention is openness, but their delivery is insensitive and their feedback lacks empathy. The team grows quiet. They nod, they comply, but they stop contributing ideas. The absence of visible conflict is misread as alignment.
In another scenario, a senior leadership team has spent years investing in a “safe” culture. No one interrupts, everyone thanks each other, but deadlines slip and performance is inconsistent. No one wants to be seen as the one who “breaks the culture” by challenging a colleague. Safety has become mistaken for comfort. The status quo is far too pleasant for members to want to rock the boat.
Now imagine a high-performing sales team under constant scrutiny to meet quarterly targets. The pressure creates accountability, but little room for error. Mistakes are not discussed, and individuals compete rather than collaborate. Despite results, turnover is high and morale is brittle.
Contrast that with a creative design agency that runs regular “safe-to-fail” workshops. Employees are encouraged to present unfinished ideas and receive collective feedback. A culture of learning is modelled by senior leaders who share their own mistakes openly. Accountability is maintained through peer review and transparent project outcomes. Psychological safety fuels risk-taking, and accountability channels it into performance.
Building the Tightrope: Practical Approaches
Creating a culture that balances safety and accountability requires both systems and relationships. Leaders need to role-model vulnerability without losing authority, and set clear expectations without resorting to threat.
Practical strategies include:
- Learning-oriented feedback: Shifting from performance evaluation to performance development. Framing feedback as a tool for growth, not judgement. For example, using coaching-style questions to explore future actions rather than post-mortems on past errors.
- After-action reviews: Embedding reflection into team routines, normalising discussion of mistakes and successes alike. These can be short, frequent, and led by different team members to ensure psychological safety is co-owned.
- Trait-aware leadership: Adapting communication and expectations based on known personality differences, particularly in feedback and goal-setting. A quiet analyst may benefit from pre-reading before meetings; a dominant influencer may need gentle interruption to allow others in.
- SCARF model (Rock, 2008): Designing interactions that respect status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness – key psychological drivers of engagement. This could mean offering input into decision-making (autonomy) or being consistent in how performance concerns are raised (fairness).
Other practices that support the balance include:
- Psychological contracts: Co-created team agreements that make explicit what safety and accountability look like in action. These help surface unspoken assumptions and allow for constructive renegotiation as the team evolves.
- Shadow boards or dissent channels: Formal opportunities for challenge and counterargument, particularly in hierarchically flat cultures. These structures can prevent groupthink and give voice to under-represented perspectives.
- Rotating team roles: Encouraging empathy and perspective-taking by rotating responsibilities like facilitation, devil’s advocacy, or customer liaison. This promotes mutual accountability and de-personalises challenge.
These interventions work not just because they tick HR boxes, but because they speak to fundamental human needs. People want to feel seen, safe, and significant.
Final Thoughts: Walking the Line
The tightrope walker doesn’t avoid risk. They train for it. They understand the forces in play, and they trust the line beneath them. Their goal is not to remove the risk, but to master the balance.
For organisations, the challenge is the same. Psychological safety and accountability are not competing priorities, but complementary ones. Safety allows people to raise their heads; accountability gives them direction.
But how each person finds their balance is different. A high-conscientiousness introvert may seek written clarity and quiet reflection; a confident extravert may favour spontaneous discussion. One individual’s feedback might feel affirming; the same feedback may feel threatening to another. A truly adaptive culture recognises this variability and flexes accordingly.
Mastering this balance is not a matter of policy, but of practice. It requires leaders to understand their people, their own tendencies, and the culture they are shaping every day. Like the tightrope walker, the best leaders aren’t fearless. They’re focused, prepared, and intentional.
In doing so, they build not just performance, but trust. And that, ultimately, is what keeps the team upright.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman.
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.
Google Re:Work. (n.d.). Guide: Understand team effectiveness. Retrieved from https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
McClelland, D. C. (1987). Human motivation. Cambridge University Press.
Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1(1), 1–9.
