The Difference Between Trust And Psychological Safety

Trust is not the same as psychological safety.

Trust and psychological safety are sometimes confused with each other, and whilst they are related, trust is actually a foundational component of psychological safety, rather than the same thing.

Trust can be defined as the extent to which we hold expectations of others in the face of uncertainty about their motives, and yet are willing to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.

Trust is indeed essential to building and maintaining psychological safety in a team: if you break another team member’s trust, it will certainly impact the psychological safety of the group. But whilst trust is necessary for psychological safety to exist, it is not sufficient. In this piece, we examine why.

The difference between psychological safety and trust

Psychological safety doesn’t simply comprise of high trust in a team. The primary difference between psychological safety and trust is that psychological safety consists of beliefs concerning the group norms – what it means for us to be a member of that group and the interpersonal risks we can take within in – whilst trust focusses on the beliefs that one person has about another.

This diagram from Science For Work explains it very well:

Trust is personal; psychological safety is a group phenomenon.

As it shows in the diagram above, when you feel a high level of psychological safety in a group, you can feel more secure in the knowledge that the other members of the group won’t harm you; they will support you and will not change the way they feel about you, even if you need help, make a mistake, or need to take an interpersonal risk.

Trust is the converse of that. You may trust your team mates to possess the competence they need in order to do their job. You may trust them follow through on a commitment they made to you, or the rest of the team. And you trust them to act professionally, ethically, and honestly – and in turn, this builds the group level of psychological safety.

This trust in someone’s capability and consistency (meaning that they can and will complete the task they said they’d complete) is known as Cognitive Trust. Cognitive trust is built through repeated demonstration of competence – the more often we successfully complete a task or deliver something to a high standard, the higher cognitive trust others will hold for us. Think about playing football (or soccer): we may pass a ball to our teammate because we trust that she’s capable of handling it and scoring a goal, and we believe this because she’s proven so many times previously.

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

The other side of trust is Affective Trust – this is trust in someone’s capacity for caring (i.e. empathy and sympathy) and their candour (i.e. honesty and integrity), which means they will do the right thing., This type of trust is built through reliable, consistent demonstrations of care: care for the individual, care for the group, and care for their impact. Affective trust affirms that we will not act in a way that undermines or harms someone else in the group (and in many cases outside the group too). Think about times when we’ve allowed ourselves to be vulnerable with someone: if they responded with care and supported us, we will believe that they care for our wellbeing, and may be more confident that they will act in our best interests in the future. That’s affective trust.

Research by Schaubroeck et al has shown that servant leadership influences affective trust and fosters psychological safety, whilst transformational leadership influences cognitive trust, which improves team performance.

It’s not enough to just be highly competent and reliable, nor is it enough to only ever have good intentions but fail to deliver on them. True trust is built via both these aspects: we must be both competent and well intentioned.

Both cognitive and affective trust are essential in a strong, psychologically safe team.

Cognitive Trust and Affective Trust

Attribution: Kenneth M. Nowack, Ph.D. and Paul J. Zak, Ph.D.

Trust as a component of psychological safety in teams

In a high performing team, trust is built through both higher degrees of interdependence, so that team mates rely on each other and work closely together, and through clarity of expectations and support. Teams that don’t possess any interdependence aren’t really a team – they’re simply a group of people dong a similar thing. It’s only via interdependence towards a shared goal that we become a team. Just as trust is essential for effective interdependence, closer interdependence over time builds ever higher trust, as long as we demonstrate both cognitive and affective competencies.

That shared goal or mission clarity is critical too. If team members know what is expected of them, what they can expect of their team mates, and that they can depend on their team mates for help, psychological safety on the team increases, as does team performance.

It’s clear to see how this interplay of trust, dependancy and mission clarity creates a group phenomenon of psychological safety.

It’s worth noting that different cultures value and build trust in different ways. Teams in India, China, Europe and the US may place more or less weight on cognitive trust than affective trust, or the other way around. And the same applies to different domains, such as healthcare or technology – some domains will lean further on affective trust, and others on cognitive trust. But in every case, both are essential – just to varying proportions.

Remember that just as everyone on the planet is unique, as is every team.

What about a lack of trust?

Shane Snow explains in this chart how a lack of trust between people results in guarded relationships, and when there is a lack of trust between teams, it can result in toxic organisational politics. With a lack of trust, we may protect ourselves by being guarded in our interpersonal interactions, or by taking part in toxic organisational politics in order to protect our status within the organisation.

So, remember that when you’re building psychological safety in your team, you must not only increase trust between team members, but also between teams, so that other people and teams in the organisation trust you and your team. We can do this via team charters and team APIs, and making our informal organisational structure explicit.

And again, this means trust in not simply “doing the thing well” (cognitive trust), but “doing the right thing” (affective trust).

Summarise: Trust vs Psychological Safety

As a simple example, consider the climber and the person belaying them in the photo below. The person climbing is putting their life in the hands of the belayer: they implicitly and completely trust them to hold the rope if they should fall. The climber has cognitive trust that the belayer knows how to belay safely, and affective trust that they’ll actually hold the rope should the climber fall.

However, they may still not feel psychologically safe enough to call down and say “I’m struggling, can you hold the rope for a minute?“, or admit that they’ve reached their limit and want to come down. That’s the core difference between trust and psychological safety. We may not feel psychologically safe, even in the presence of deep trust.

Photo by Andrew Shelley on Unsplash

And watch this video on Instagram of Laurie Greenland and Ollie Davis riding the Poland MTB World Cup course – This shows deep trust in your teammate to not make mistakes, which is great. But it doesn’t automatically follow that you would feel psychologically safe with them. This is cognitive or task trust, not relational or affective trust. Both are necessary, yet still not sufficient.

Foundations of psychological safety

Just as building deep trust takes time – indeed, if someone tells you to “Trust me“, it can actually reduce your trust in them – building psychological safety takes a long time too. And it’s not enough to say “This team is psychologically safe.” To build psychological safety, team members and leaders need to demonstrate to each other that they can be trusted, in all the myriad ways that trust manifests, both affectively and cognitively.

Trust is necessary for psychological safety, but not sufficient.

Through building trust, the foundations of psychological safety in a team are set. Read more here for ten key behaviours to create and maintain psychological safety.

Or download the entire psychological safety tool kit for exercises, workshops, surveys and tools.