It is also a matter of time: A systemic and temporal account for the interplay of trust and psychological safety in groups

Petru Lucian Curşeu, Cătălina Oţoiu

Abstract: Research on emergent states in groups proliferated in the last decades. In most of the studies psychological safety and trust are essential drivers of learning and performance in groups. The interplay of the two emergent states is however less understood. Using a systemic approach we first test in a cross‑sectional study (60 groups) the extent to which psychological safety mediates the impact of group diversity on the emergence of trust and show that age, knowledge and cognitive motivation disparity negatively impact on the emergence of psychological safety, which in turn has a positive impact on the emergence of trust. Further, using a temporal persistency framework, we explore the interplay between trust and psychological safety in a longitudinal study on 49 groups and show that, on the long run, the emergence of trust in the early stages of group development predicts psychological safety at later stages.
Key words: temporariness, trust, psychological safety, diversity, group learning