Why Innovation Depends on Intellectual Honesty

Fostering psychological safety isn’t enough if managers don’t pay particular attention to creating conditions for healthy debate.

Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, Curtis Lefrandt, and Taeya Howell

January 17, 2023

The Research

• The authors surveyed teams in more than 60 technology startups and established companies in a variety of industries to understand the interaction between psychological safety and intellectual honesty, and the extent to which they are essential to fostering innovation.
• To measure psychological safety, they used the survey questions developed by Amy Edmondson for her study published in Administrative Science Quarterly.ⁱ
• To measure intellectual honesty, they developed questions based ...