The shadow of toughness
Why psychological safety is the one thing that actually protects people at work.
There’s a story organisations tell themselves when times get hard.
We need to tighten up. Cut the soft stuff. Focus on what matters. People need to be more resilient.
It sounds responsible. It sounds like leadership.
It’s the organisational shadow speaking.
A landmark study by Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey, published in the International Journal of Public Health, tracked more than 27,000 US healthcare workers across two surveys. The first was published in May 2019, before anyone had heard of COVID-19, and another in May 2021, deep into the pandemic. They were looking for what actually protected people against burnout and the desire to leave.
Not what should have, in theory. What did.
The answer wasn’t better pay. It wasn’t lighter workloads. What protected people was psychological safety: the felt sense that they could speak up, raise concerns, name mistakes, and ask for help without being punished.
Increasing psychological safety by one standard deviation decreased burnout by 0.72 points and increased willingness to stay by 0.63 points. The effects were strongest for women and people of colour. Those were the group burning out fastest, and the ones who historically have been least listened to.
The shadow of high performance
Most organisations carry a group shadow: the collection of truths, impulses, and realities a system pushes underground to maintain its self-image. Every culture has one.
And in many workplaces, one of the deepest shadow elements is this: vulnerability is dangerous here.
High-performance cultures are especially prone to this. The stated values are excellence, accountability and results. The unwritten rule is: don’t show strain. Don’t say the workload is impossible. Don’t be the one who can’t keep up.
This rule gets transmitted through micro-signals. The way a manager’s face changes when someone says, “I’m overwhelmed.” The conspicuous silence when a colleague takes a mental health day.
Jung called projection the act of seeing in the outer world what we cannot face in ourselves. Organisations do this too. The high-performance culture that exiles vulnerability will find it manifesting as burnout, attrition, and the slow erosion of trust. The very thing it tried to eliminate becomes the thing it cannot stop producing.
The Edmondson and Kerrissey study makes the cost visible. When people don’t feel safe enough to speak, they go quiet, burn out, and eventually leave. And the ones who stay are often the ones who’ve learned to suppress the most. This has the knock-on effect that the culture grows quieter, more brittle, more toxic over time.
The double bind
When an organisation takes its own systemic failure to provide psychological safety and locates it within individual workers, this is projection operating at the cultural level.
You’re burnt out? Build resilience. You’re struggling? Practice self-care. You want to leave? You’re not committed enough.
The system creates conditions that damage people, then frames the damage as a personal deficiency. The shadow stays hidden because the narrative is so convincing: it’s not our culture to blame; it’s your coping skills.
Edmondson and Kerrissey frame psychological safety as a “social resource”; something the organisation provides or destroys, not something individuals manufacture alone.
Brené Brown has been pointing at the same truth from a different direction for years. In Daring Greatly, she describes how organisations simultaneously demand courage and punish vulnerability, creating a double bind that leaves people with no psychological ground to stand on. You’re supposed to bring your best self. But your best self isn’t welcome here.
That double bind has a name. It’s the organisational shadow.
What the shadow protects
If psychological safety is this powerful, and the evidence is now substantial that it is, why do so few organisations invest in it seriously?
Because real psychological safety threatens the shadow.
If people can speak freely, they’ll name the dysfunction. They’ll say the strategy isn’t working. They’ll say the workload is inhumane and that the “culture of excellence” is actually a culture of fear.
Psychological safety is an accountability mechanism. And that’s precisely why the shadow resists it. A psychologically safe team is one where the truth can surface. Most organisations are not structured to survive their own truth.
The shadow’s function is to keep the unsayable unsaid. Psychological safety makes things sayable. They are natural enemies.
Amy Edmondson originally developed the concept of psychological safety studying medical teams in the 1990s, and found something counterintuitive: safer teams reported more errors, not fewer. These teams didn’t make more mistakes; they were better able to report them. The willingness to say “something went wrong” was itself the sign of health.
In many organisations, that willingness has been trained out of people.
The leaders who can’t see it
McKinsey research found that only 26% of leaders consistently exhibit behaviours that create psychological safety. Three in four leaders are actively, if unconsciously, maintaining environments where people cannot be honest.
Most of these leaders don’t experience themselves as unsafe. That is exactly how the personal shadow works.
The leader who shuts down dissent believes they’re “keeping the team focused.” The one who micromanages believes they “care about quality.” The one who punishes visible emotion thinks they’re “maintaining standards.” Each of them has a story that makes their behaviour reasonable. Each story keeps the shadow intact.
This is why leadership development so often fails to shift anything. It addresses skills when the real barrier is shadow. Creating psychological safety requires tolerating uncertainty, admitting you don’t know, and sharing power. For leaders whose identity rests on competence, control, and certainty, that will feel threatening. For some intolerable
Gabor Maté, writing about the physiology of stress and suppression in When the Body Says No, observes that what we cannot express internally tends to express itself through the body and through the systems we inhabit. The stressed, suppressed team is the organisational equivalent of the stressed, suppressed body. The symptoms look different. The mechanism is identical.
Safety is the presence of connection
While it might be tempting to think of psychological as the absence of tension. It isn’t. It’s the presence of connection.
Organisations that misunderstand this spend enormous energy trying to eliminate discomfort. They run away from conflict and smooth over difficult conversations.
Real safety is the capacity to stay in contact with the truth and with each other when things are hard. The ability to say the hard thing and stay in connection. To make a mistake and not be cast out. To disagree and not be punished for the honesty of it.
That quality, the felt sense that you are not alone with what you know, is what Edmondson and Kerrissey found holding people together through the worst conditions of the pandemic.
The organisations that build that kind of culture do so consciously. It never happens by accident.
The invitation
The research is unambiguous. Psychological safety doesn’t require more money or more time. It requires something far harder: the willingness to let people tell the truth about what’s happening, and the courage to hear it without punishing them for speaking.
The shadow’s deepest fear is that if people start telling the truth, the whole story the organisation tells about itself will come apart.
That’s exactly why they should.
The patterns explored here of projection, shadow leadership, and organisational dynamics that damage people are central to my forthcoming book, The Shadow at Work. Please subscribe to support this project.