---
type: "synthesis"
tags: ["psychological-safety", "edmondson", "theoretical-spine"]
articles: ["a036", "a038", "a040", "a042", "a052", "a078", "a079"]
id: "cross-psychological-safety-backbone"
sources: ["adoption"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-adoption"
originDay: 9
articleStem: "hbr-seg-adoption"
sourceUrl: "(unified vault: 11 sources)"
sourceTitle: "HBR — People Ⅲ-A · Adoption / trust / literacy / psych-safety"
---
One theory underwrites almost the entire corpus: Amy Edmondson's psychological safety. It is the connective tissue across seven of eleven articles, and Edmondson is the only figure who appears in two of them.

- **A036** anchors its Pillar 5 (experimentation, innovation grants — [[action-introduce-innovation-grants]]) in [[entity-amy-edmondson|Edmondson's]] failure/safety research.
- **A038** cites it directly as [[lit-psychological-safety]] — the mechanism behind the 61% trust-reduces-workslop finding.
- **A040** builds [[concept-digital-playgrounds]] as *engineered* psychological safety around AI experimentation.
- **A041's** safe-harbor evaluations ([[concept-risk-free-adoption]]) are psychological safety operationalized in compensation.
- **A042** treats it as a hard [[prereq-psychological-safety-d42|prerequisite]] for adoption; **A052** and **A078** likewise require it ([[prereq-psychological-safety-d78]]).
- **A079 (Seth & Edmondson)** is the *capstone*: [[entity-amy-c-edmondson|Edmondson]] co-authors, arguing AI uniquely threatens safety and that its own tools ([[framework-ai-integration-principles]], intelligent-vs-basic failure) are the fix.

Note the two entity ids for the same person — [[entity-amy-edmondson]] (cited in A036) and [[entity-amy-c-edmondson]] (co-author of A079) — a marker of how the corpus moves her from cited authority to primary voice. The synthesis: psychological safety is the *invariant* beneath the corpus's many labels (FOBO, trust ambiguity, algorithmic cage, empathy). Every framework is, at root, a psychological-safety intervention.