Position, Not Composition: A Decomposition Analysis of the Supervisor-Employee Psychological Safety Gap

Psychological safety is widely recognized as a relevant ally to effective organizational learning, employee voice, and performance. Yet a consistently observed organizational pattern is that supervisors report higher psychological safety than non-supervisors. Drawing on theories of hierarchical influence, information asymmetries, and self–other agreement in leadership perceptions, we investigate whether this supervisor–employee psychological safety gap reflects positional advantages of supervisory roles or compositional differences in who occupies them. We analyze survey data from 183 working professionals from diverse occupational fields recruited through the Cloud Research online platform (62 supervisors; 121 non-supervisors). Hierarchical regression shows that supervisory status is positively associated with psychological safety, net of age, sex, race, education, household income, and occupational field. Household income is positively associated with psychological safety, whereas other demographic controls exhibit limited explanatory power. To differentiate varying compositional from gap-positional accounts, we apply a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition that partitions supervisor–employee differences into an “explained” component attributable to group differences in observed characteristics and an “unexplained” component attributable to differential returns or unmeasured role-based factors. Decomposition indicates that observed demographic compositions explain little to no supervisor–employee gap, whereas unexplained components account for nearly all of it. Results revealed that observed demographic factors outlined little to no supervisor–employee differences, whereas unexplained (residual) components account for nearly all of the actual gap, consistent with role-linked differences rather than selection on measured characteristics.