New research from Mississippi State finds that the gap in psychological safety between supervisors and employees is driven almost entirely by the position each person holds, not by who they are. That distinction changes what leaders can actually do about it.
There's a scene most managers know. The meeting ends, decisions get made, and a day or two later someone pulls you aside to say exactly what should have been said in the room. The concern that would have shifted the outcome. The idea that could have saved two weeks of rework.
Most managers file that moment under "people are complicated" and move on. New research from Mississippi State University points to a more specific and more actionable explanation.
The Gap Researchers Have Been Documenting for Years
Organizational psychologists call it psychological safety: the degree to which people feel they can speak up, raise concerns, and take interpersonal risks at work without fear of humiliation or retaliation. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson developed the concept in the 1990s, and decades of organizational research have confirmed it as one of the strongest predictors of team performance. Teams with high psychological safety catch mistakes earlier, surface better ideas, and consistently outperform peers on measurable outcomes.
One pattern appears reliably across that research: supervisors report higher psychological safety than the employees they supervise. The gap exists across industries, company sizes, and organizational cultures. What has been harder to establish is what actually drives it.
The intuitive explanation is demographic. Supervisors tend to be older, better educated, and higher earning. Maybe people who get promoted to management are simply more confident or more willing to speak up, and that trait difference explains the pattern. If that's true, closing the gap means changing who gets promoted, which is slow, difficult, and rarely produces what organizations expect.
What a New MSU Study Found
A study published this spring in the American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Business tested both explanations directly. Dr. Will Reed and Dr. Sean Owen of Mississippi State's College of Professional and Continuing Studies surveyed 183 working adults across industries and applied a statistical method called Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to pull apart the supervisor-employee psychological safety gap. The method separates an observed difference into two components: what's explained by who the people are, and what's explained by the role they hold.
Across the sample, supervisors reported meaningfully higher psychological safety than non-supervisors, averaging 4.02 versus 3.75 on a five-point scale. The gap was real and statistically significant.
When the decomposition ran, the answer came back unambiguous.
Demographic factors, including age, sex, race, education, income, and occupation, accounted for roughly negative 0.3 percent of the gap, statistically indistinguishable from zero. The role-linked component accounted for just over 100 percent of it.
The researchers flag a detail that sharpens this further: supervisors in the sample had lower average household incomes than non-supervisors, $78,000 versus $90,600. By the numbers, demographic composition favored the employees. The gap ran in the opposite direction anyway, because of the position itself.
What This Means for Anyone Who Manages People
The implication is uncomfortable, but it's concrete. When your best people go quiet, it is not, in most cases, a personality problem. It is a structural one, produced by the real or perceived risks that come with speaking across a power distance, and by the advantages a supervisory position carries that a non-supervisory position does not: discretion, decision-making influence, information access, protection from retaliation.
That structural reality exists whether or not you're aware of it. It exists even when you consider yourself approachable. It exists even when people say everything is fine.
The researchers flag a practical consequence: silence in your organization is probably not what it looks like. It isn't agreement, and it isn't comfort. It's the predictable behavior of people whose position doesn't afford them the same latitude to speak that yours does.
What Doesn't Address a Structural Problem
An open-door policy doesn't close a structural gap. Asking "any questions?" at the end of a meeting doesn't close it either. Neither does being visible, being friendly, or telling people their input is valued.
These approaches treat a structural problem as a relational one. They aren't without value, but they don't change the underlying reality that employees' positions carry different risks than yours. Until that changes, the silence is rational on their part, and well-intentioned gestures don't alter the math.
What the Research Points Toward
Closing a gap driven by position requires changes at the position level. Reed and Owen point to several structural approaches supported by organizational research:
- Strengthen anti-retaliation norms and make them visible. Establish explicit expectations that speaking up is valued, and be transparent about what happens when someone does. Norms without demonstrated consequences are just words.
- Distribute decision-making authority in ways that are real. Give team members genuine influence within their domain, not just consultative input that can be set aside. Perceived influence changes the risk calculation of speaking up.
- Build structured processes for surfacing concerns. Create regular, dedicated channels for employees to raise issues without requiring a direct confrontation with a supervisor. Anonymous input mechanisms and structured feedback intervals serve this function when managed deliberately.
- Develop the skill to recognize what silence signals. Learn to distinguish silence that reflects comfort from silence that reflects caution. These look similar from the outside and call for different responses.
That last skill, and the organizational knowledge underlying all four approaches, is what applied leadership education is built to develop. The capacity to read and respond to team dynamics accurately isn't intuitive. It's learned, and it requires the kind of grounded, applied curriculum that connects organizational theory to real decisions in real organizations.
Applied Leadership Graduate Certificate at Mississippi State
The Applied Leadership Graduate Certificate (ALC) is an 18-credit graduate certificate designed for working professionals seeking focused, immediately applicable leadership development. The curriculum covers organizational behavior, team dynamics, and the human systems that shape how people communicate, make decisions, and perform under pressure.
The ALC is delivered fully online and is stackable toward the Master of Applied Science in Organizational Leadership, so the credential you earn now can apply directly to a graduate degree later.
Learn more about the Applied Leadership Graduate Certificate
Master of Applied Science in Organizational Leadership at Mississippi State
The MASOL is a graduate degree for mid-career professionals ready to understand organizations more precisely and lead them more effectively. The program integrates organizational theory, applied research, and leadership practice, with concentrations available in military leadership, nonprofit management, public management, and sports administration.
Delivered fully online in accelerated eight-week terms, the MASOL is designed for students who are working while they earn.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is psychological safety in the workplace?
Psychological safety refers to the shared belief among team members that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. A team with high psychological safety is one where people feel comfortable raising concerns, admitting mistakes, asking questions, and proposing ideas without fear of embarrassment or retaliation. The concept was developed by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School and has since become one of the most researched constructs in organizational behavior. Google's Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the single strongest predictor of high team performance.
Why do employees not speak up to their managers?
The most common assumption is that it's a personality issue: some people are simply more assertive or more comfortable with conflict. But research increasingly points to the structure of the workplace itself. Employees who lack decision-making authority, who face retaliation risks, or who have less information access than their supervisors are rational to stay quiet regardless of their personality. A 2026 study from Mississippi State University found that the gap in psychological safety between supervisors and employees is driven almost entirely by the position each person holds, not by individual characteristics.
What did the MSU research find about the supervisor-employee psychological safety gap?
A study published in the American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Business by CPCS researchers Dr. Will Reed and Dr. Sean Owen examined what drives the well-documented gap in psychological safety between supervisors and employees. Using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis across a sample of 183 working adults, they found that demographic factors, including age, sex, race, education, income, and occupation, accounted for essentially none of the gap, while role-linked factors accounted for essentially all of it. Supervisors averaged 4.02 on a five-point psychological safety scale; non-supervisors averaged 3.75. Notably, supervisors in the sample had lower average household incomes than non-supervisors, meaning demographics could not explain the gap. The position itself drove the difference.
Does employee demographics or diversity affect psychological safety?
The MSU study found that demographic factors, including race, sex, education, and income, did not significantly predict psychological safety or explain the supervisor-employee gap. This suggests that increasing demographic diversity alone, while valuable for many reasons, is unlikely to close the gap in how supervisors and employees experience psychological safety at work. Closing that gap requires structural changes at the position level: strengthening voice mechanisms, distributing real decision-making authority, and building explicit processes for surfacing concerns.
Can managers improve psychological safety on their team?
Yes, but the most effective approaches work at the structural level rather than the interpersonal one. Common advice, being more approachable, asking for feedback, holding regular one-on-ones, can help at the margins. But it doesn't change the underlying reality that employees' positions carry different risks than supervisory ones. Research points toward more structural interventions: strengthening anti-retaliation norms, distributing genuine decision-making authority to employees, and creating structured channels for raising concerns. These require deliberate design and consistent maintenance, which is part of why leadership education in organizational behavior is more useful here than general management advice.
What leadership programs teach psychological safety and organizational behavior?
CPCS at Mississippi State offers two programs that address organizational behavior, team dynamics, and the applied leadership skills involved in building high-performing teams. The Applied Leadership Graduate Certificate (ALC) is an 18-credit graduate certificate for working professionals seeking a focused, stackable credential. The Master of Applied Science in Organizational Leadership (MASOL) is a full graduate degree for mid-career professionals developing deeper organizational expertise. Both are delivered fully online with schedules designed for students who are working while they study.
How does leadership education connect to team performance?
Research on psychological safety suggests that team performance depends significantly on the conditions leaders create, not just the talent they've assembled. How well a team surfaces new ideas, catches mistakes, and navigates challenges is shaped by structural factors that leaders control. Understanding how to build those conditions is a core function of leadership education. Programs grounded in organizational research, like CPCS's ALC and MASOL, equip leaders with the frameworks and applied tools to recognize what's driving team behavior and respond effectively, rather than defaulting to intuition.
Reed, W., & Owen, S. (2026). Position, not composition: A decomposition analysis of the supervisor-employee psychological safety gap. American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Business, 12(2), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajtab.20261202.11
About the Authors
Dr. Will Reed is an Assistant Professor at the College of Professional and Continuing Studies at Mississippi State University. He leads undergraduate and graduate organizational leadership programs and draws on prior careers in the U.S. Army and corporate consulting. Dr. Sean Owen is Associate Dean and Research Professor at CPCS. His work focuses on applied leadership education, adult learner access, and workforce-aligned program development.