Risk READINESS for Psychological Safety at Workplace: A New Decision-Making Thermometer

GuangLun Hsiang (Ph.D. student), Yijing Wang, Silvia Ravazzani, and Yan Jin. “Risk READINESS for Psychological Safety at Workplace: A New Decision-Making Thermometer.” Accepted for presentation at BledCom (The 33rd International Public Relations Research Symposium), June 26 -27, 2026, Bled, Slovenia. Abstract: Organizations increasingly recognize psychological safety (PS) as a critical foundation for effective teamwork and open communication. However, in practice, PS is still treated as binary or static, which ignores how it fluctuates across teams, time, and issues. This conceptual paper, grounded in the READINESS framework, proposes reframing of PS as a dynamic spectrum, the level of which is determined by a matrix of situational and dispositional factors through individual, team, organizational, and societal lenses. By positioning PS as a spectrum and time-varying rather than static, we anticipate a better explanatory power for variations in employees' behaviors across diverse organizational contexts while also accounting for the role of strategic/internal communication in the workplace at different levels, integrating multilevel efficacy, mindset, and dynamic processes with a spectrum view of PS to explain how organizations convert voice into learning under pressure.