Developing and Validating Japanese Versions of Psychological Safety Scale, Knowledge Sharing Scale and Expressed Humility Scale

Abstract

Organizational research has increased in the contemporary, digitalized and global society. Mainly researchers in Western countries conducted empirical, organizational research in the past. These studies have investigated combinations of psychological safety, knowledge sharing and leaders’ expression of humility because these variables have crucial roles in organizational functions. Japanese research on these variables has been scarce due to the lack of scales for assessing these variables in Japanese. From a methodological perspective, research conducted in Western and other cultures where most people understand English requires multicultural validation studies. Therefore, we developed Japanese versions of scales assessing psychological safety, knowledge sharing and expressed humility and assessed their structural validity, internal consistency and convergent validity. The results indicated factor structures and inter-correlations between the scales consistent with previous research. This work is novel because of its large samples across multiple job types in contemporary work organizations. We expect this study to make methodological and theoretical contributions to future research.