Leap Trends · Culture · Psychological safety
Also touches on the condition Leadership · How we choose the condition
Briefing
Psychological safety of middle managers and their role in teams
- Middle managers
- Leading by example
- New managers
Middle managers feel less free to voice mistakes and doubts than their own bosses and their own teams, and newly promoted managers least of all. Yet they are the layer expected to model psychological safety in teams. Culture work that skips this layer does not land.
This briefing has not been updated for more than three months. Check the figures against the source before you use them.
Compiled with AI from public sources, with the source for every figure. Key figures labelled Checked have been compared with the source by a person. How that works
Key figures
- 80%+of 150 frontline hospital staff surveyed want to contribute to innovation; fewer than half get the chance.MIT Sloan Management ReviewNot yet checked
- 70%of those same staff rarely or never share an idea.MIT Sloan Management ReviewNot yet checked
- 46%of the most senior leaders worldwide experienced a lot of stress the previous day, 7 points more than employees without a management role.GallupNot yet checked
What the sources say
Hagen and Zhao surveyed more than a thousand managers and found a counter-intuitive pattern: middle managers feel less safe voicing doubt or a mistake than both their own bosses and their own teams. Those promoted less than three years ago score lowest. The authors’ explanation: after a promotion you have more to lose, the top rarely shares its own mistakes, and hybrid working makes the middle layer lonely.
That is a problem, because psychological safety in a team starts with the person leading it. Researchers writing in MIT Sloan Management Review followed 150 frontline healthcare workers: over eighty per cent want to contribute ideas on innovation, fewer than half get the opportunity and seventy per cent rarely or never share an idea. The authors call the middle manager indispensable for breaking this open, and also under threat, because organisations are cutting precisely that layer. Gallup adds that managers report daily stress, anger and loneliness more often than the people below them.
How solid is this? Two studies and a survey in twelve months, with small samples. The indications are sharp; the breadth has yet to come.
For the leadership team
Psychological safety programmes target teams and skip the layer in between. The researchers point to the top: as long as executives rarely share a mistake of their own, middle managers stay silent, and the team below them stays silent too. That is a question about behaviour at the leadership table itself.
Sources
- MIT Sloan Management Review · Mosner, Sting and ChandrasekaranHow Leaders Unlock Innovation on the Front Lines
- GallupState of the Global Workplace 2026
Declining manager engagement is by no means inevitable.
- Harvard Business Review · Jan U. Hagen and Bin ZhaoMiddle Managers Feel the Least Psychological Safety at Work
We summarise in our own words and quote no more than one sentence per source. Read the original: there is more in it. How we use sources.
Academic research
- Northumbria University · Leader et al.Fostering Psychological Safety From Unsafe Ground: Professional Identity and the Leadership Paradox in NHS Nursing and Midwifery
- University of British Columbia · WangPsychological Safety of School Administrators: A Dual Reality
Academic articles on the same phenomenon, no more than a year old at the last search, from universities in Europe and North America, found through the open database OpenAlex. These articles count towards the publications per month; the text and key figures above are based on the sources. How we choose the articles.
How this briefing has been updated
Title now describes the topics; previously “The middle manager feels least safe” (AI)
Added 2 articles from universities in Europe and North America (via OpenAlex). (AI)
First draft based on HBR, MIT SMR and Gallup. (AI)