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their dyadic relationships are safe for interpersonal risk taking. Unless a sense of
psychological safety is secured, individuals normally weigh the vulnerability or risks and
decide whether to engage in opinion sharing and to expend efforts in an assignment.
Psychological safety and trust are psychological conditions related to interpersonal
experience. Both concepts involve perceptions of risk or vulnerability and decisions whether
to avoid negative consequences. Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995) argue that “trust is the
willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of the other party, based on the
expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective
of the ability to monitor or control the other party.” Jones and George (1998) also suggest that
“trust is an expression of confidence between the parties in an exchange of some kind—
confidence that they will not be harmed or put at risk by the actions of the other party, or
confidence that no party to the exchange will exploit the other’s vulnerability.” In general,
trust is similar to psychological safety in terms of making a choice about whether to put
oneself at risk. However, they are different constructs. Edmondson (2004) identifies three
different dimensions that separate them: self versus others, short versus long period, and
group- versus individual-level analysis. Psychological safety is a self-assessment process,
whereas trust focuses on the potential behavior of trustees. The tacit process in psychological
safety is about whether to engage in a specific action (e.g., speak up), and such process is
short; conversely, trust emerges over a long-term horizon. Finally, psychological safety is a
group-level analysis about how safe a person feels in a group, while trust is individual specific.
Prior organizational behavior research has emphasized the importance of psychological
safety in promoting learning, sharing knowledge, and expressing oneself in the workplace
(Kahn, 1990), in project teams (Edmondson, 1999), and in manufacturing workshops
(Siemsen et al., 2009). Only recently pioneering studies (e.g., Zhang, Fang, Wei, and Chen,
2010) begun to apply the psychological safety concept in virtual communities. Unlike
general computer-mediated communication platforms (e.g., chat rooms), on which
individuals can meet new friends, most SNS members are acquaintances and are identifiable
in offline settings. Therefore, users’ self-expressive behavior in the form of posting may put
themselves at risk because people can trace the origins of messages back to the senders.
Thus, psychological safety becomes an important issue when posting on SNSs.
In an online setting, psychological safety is individuals’ perceptions of whether it is safe
to self-express in an interpersonal context. Kahn (1990) identifies four dimensions of
psychological safety: interpersonal relationships, group and intergroup dynamics,
management style and process, and organizational norms. This four-dimensional framework