PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY: FEAR WORKS, UNTIL IT DOESN’T

This year, my clients have been coming into our sessions saying the same thing. They can’t focus. Can’t find the motivation they used to have. Feel creatively starved. They’re doing what they have to do, but not much more. Not because they don’t try or don’t want to. These are people who used to love their jobs and the companies they work for, and they’ve always gone above and beyond. So they don’t understand what happened.

For the past seven or eight years, I’ve worked with people in tech who believed in their companies, loved the products they were building and the services they provided, cared deeply about their teams, and believed in the mission. Without exception, my clients went beyond what was expected of them, not because anyone made them, but because they wanted to.

Then something shifted. Layoffs kept coming across tech (U.S. tech companies announced close to 166,000 job cuts in just the first nine months of this year, a 54% jump from the same period last year), and across the medical, legal, and education fields too. Uncertainty became part of everyday life. And in a lot of workplaces, fear started showing up in how people were being talked to:

“Look at what’s happening at other companies [people are getting fired].”
“If it doesn’t get done, we’re gonna be in trouble.”
“We’re not backfilling that role; we’ll have to make it work.”

The “we” that actually means “you”.

And sometimes the fear isn’t in what’s said at all. It’s in what’s left unsaid: the meeting that gets moved without explanation, the role that quietly disappears, the silence where answers should be. Nobody has to say “you could be next” for people to hear it. So they keep their heads down, work longer hours, stop raising ideas, and wait for the next shoe to drop. And slowly, the focus and motivation they used to have start to fade, without them even noticing when it began.

I know this feeling from the inside, too. This past year has been heavy for me. Between my clients’ layoffs, the uncertainty in our industry, the political climate, and personal issues, I noticed my own focus, motivation, and creativity slowly slipping away due to fear. I share more about that in my newsletter, because it deserves more space there than I can give it here (sign up to receive my newsletter). And living it myself helped me understand, in my body and not just in my head, what my clients have been describing.

A STORY I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT

Over the weekend, I was at a gathering and overheard someone sharing that almost an entire team had just quit. Nine out of ten people, in the same week, most on the same day. They all told him the same thing: they couldn’t take the fear tactics anymore, and they had found jobs somewhere else.

He was stunned. He genuinely believed that a little fear, reminding people all year about the layoffs across the industry, would keep them on their toes and motivate them to work harder to help the bottom line. What he couldn’t understand was why they would rather risk starting over somewhere new, or even unemployment, than just push a little harder under a little pressure.

I didn’t know him, and it wasn’t my place to jump in, but I’ve been thinking about him ever since. I don’t believe he’s a bad person. I believe he was doing what he thought would work, and maybe what had been done to him in the past. What he didn’t see was that his team wasn’t missing motivation; they were missing psychological safety. And a team doesn’t walk out together after a “little bit of pressure”. When nine out of ten people leave in the same week, they’ve usually been under pressure and afraid for a long time. They keep going, and keep going, until one day they won’t anymore.

Entrevaux, France. Photo creds Miriam Burke

SO, WHEN DOES FEAR STOP WORKING?

To answer this question, I need to give you a little bit of science. The honest answer is that fear does work, initially, for a little while, and can even be a performance boost. When we’re afraid of losing something, we work harder. I’ve done it myself several times. And you too.

Psychologist Tahira Probst at Washington State University has been studying chronic fear at work for almost twenty years. In one of her early studies, people who felt their jobs were at risk became more productive, but their creative problem-solving went down. Even then, she and her team expected that productivity boost to fade if the uncertainty dragged on.

Her newest research shows what happens when it does. In a 2026 study, Probst and her colleagues found that workers who feared AI could make their entire occupation obsolete were more likely to morally disengage, quietly justifying behavior they would normally consider wrong. And that showed up in more counterproductive behavior at work, like coming in late and checking out online. The effect was strongest in the industries most exposed to AI. These aren’t bad employees. They’re people who’ve been afraid for too long.

That’s the part that matters, because the science on chronic fear is really clear. Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten has spent decades studying the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain right behind your forehead that handles focus, planning, judgment, and keeping our emotions in check. It’s also the part of the brain most sensitive to stress, and even mild stress that feels out of our control can take it offline quickly, handing control over to older, more reactive parts of the brain. When that stress goes on and on, it actually starts to wear down the connections in that area.

So the very things leaders need most from their people – creativity, clear thinking, good judgment, new ideas – are the first things chronic fear takes away. People stop speaking up, stop suggesting the idea that might get shot down, and start protecting themselves instead. And eventually they do exactly what that team did. They go looking for safety somewhere else. I’ve watched this happen inside teams after layoffs, and I wrote about how teams can rebuild in The Hidden Work of Rebuilding Teams After Layoffs.

WHERE IS ALL THIS FEAR COMING FROM?

This is the part I really want leaders to hear, with compassion. A lot of the fear coming down on teams starts with leaders who are afraid themselves. Afraid of failing, of losing control, of what the board will say, of being the next one to go. A 2024 paper in Administrative Sciences describes how leaders acting from their own fears can create a culture of fear without meaning to, and how it feeds on itself, with trust and commitment dropping a little more each round.

And fear rolls downhill: from the board to C-suite, to lead of leads, to leads (leaders, directors, and managers), and to the people doing the work, the ICs (individual contributors). Most of the time, they don’t realize they’re passing it on because they’re so caught up in the motion. I’m not pointing fingers. I’m pointing at something we can only change once we see it.

WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS

I believe the best way to have people trust you, follow you, and go the extra mile for you is to create an environment where they feel safe. Psychological safety comes first; it builds trust, and trust is what gives you real influence. Amy Edmondson, whose work I’ve read and used with teams for years, describes psychological safety as a shared belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks on a team. And when Google studied 180 of its own teams, psychological safety stood out as the most important factor in which teams were most effective.

Psychological safety isn’t softness, and it doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It goes hand in hand with accountability. It’s awareness. It’s understanding what’s going on with your people and changing how you communicate and work with them because of it. Safety without standards creates teams that are comfortable but not high performers, and standards without safety create teams that go quiet. The goal is both.

Safety starts from the top. If you lead people, here are three small places to start building psychological safety today:

• Notice your own fear first. Before your next team meeting, ask yourself whether what you’re about to say is meant to inform people or to scare them.
• Tell the truth, with care. Share what you know, what you don’t know yet, and when you expect to know more. In my experience, people can handle hard news much better than silence and guessing. I saw this play out with three different companies last year, and I wrote about what made the difference in What Layoffs Reveal About Company Culture.
• Make it safe to speak up. Ask your team what’s getting in their way, and then listen without punishing the answer. Edmondson adds one more piece I love: when someone brings you bad news, thank them first before asking questions or dealing with the issue. Your immediate reaction sets the standard for the entire team. 

The people on your team who are still giving their best right now aren’t doing it because they’re afraid. They’re doing it because they still believe in you, in the work, and in each other. Fear is what will eventually make them leave. Psychological safety is what will make them stay.

If this resonated with you, I write about patterns like this and more in my newsletter, a letter I send every 2-3 weeks about what I’m living and learning. Join here →

And if you lead a team that’s feeling the weight of this year and you’d like support, let’s talk.

Book a free session here →

WANT TO DIG DEEPER?

Here are more links to the research behind this post:

• Productivity, counterproductivity and creativity: The ups and downs of job insecurity, by Tahira Probst (2010), Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology
• Understanding and Mitigating Leadership Fear-Based Behaviors on Employee and Organizational Success, Jason Hubbart (2024), Administrative Sciences
• Why Psychological Safety Is the Hidden Engine Behind Innovation and Transformation, Michelle Bonterre (2025), Harvard Business Impact
• What Sustained Fear-Based Leadership Does to a Workforce Over Time, SHRM (2026)

With love and gratitude,

Miriam

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