language diversity and its impact on team performance

Language diversity and its effects on team

performanceGiulio Valagussa

University of Tübingen Department of International Business

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Three factors that increased its importance:- Globalization (deregulation of capital and

workforce movement);- Researchers’ consideration of language as

an independent factor from culture in general (starting from the late 90’s);

- The shift of level of analysis from that of the individual to that of the organization.

The role of language in today’s teams

University of Tübingen, Department of International

Business

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Grammatical and lexicon knowledge; Contextualization cues (such as tone of

voice, pauses, gestures and so on…) that vary from culture to culture and can lead to different interpretations of the same word or phrase;

Linguistic distance between foreign worker’s mother tongue and the official corporate language;

Education received during scholastic years.

The determinants of language asymmetries


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Consequence of the use of a corporate language, such as English, as lingua franca;

Members who are less fluent in that language feel isolated and excluded from the rest of the group;

Team meetings and interactions are impoverished in their contents by the inability of those members to express their thoughts as they would like.

The “silencing effect” (1)


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SanAntonio (1987) case: a team split in two locations (USA and Japan), with Japanese members behaving differently according to the language spoken;

Piekkari, Oxelheim and Randoy’s (2014) experiment on nine firm’s heterogeneous corporate boards.

The “silencing effect” (2)


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Area under observation: from individual’s characteristics to interactions within the team as a whole.Language is a barrier that can limit cooperation between team members.Two forms a faultline can take (Jehn & Bezrukova, 2010): “Dormant faultlines” are lines that, by nature, separate

people according to their demographic characteristics, or personality traits;

“Activated faultlines” are material divisions that occur when those differences are perceived by the people.

The latter can generate subgrouping.

Language as a faultline


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Experiment of Hinds, Neeley and Cramton (2013): Realized through interviews and

observations on a MNC’s six teams split in two different countries (among which, USA, Germany and India);

Open-ended questions about tasks and interactions required;

Concurrent observations of team activities (e.g., meetings, e-mails);

Subgrouping


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Emotion-regulation strategies: Situation selection: one’s decision not to

undertake an action because of the perception of the bad effects it will generate;

Situation modification: one undertakes the action trying to modify the conditions that originally would bring him/her an unwanted emotion;

Code switching: switching from one language to another during the same dialogue;

Reappraisal: one tries to act proactively, in order to reduce the gap with its colleagues.

Reactions to subgrouping


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The authors found out that in order for a faultline to produce its effects, a source should activate it. This source was identified with power contests and perceived shifts of power between some of the teams analysed.The more the information is symmetrically distributed, the stronger those two phenomena.

Findings


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Linguistic Ostracism (LO) is the condition suffered by an individual who cannot understand what other people say.Research of Dotan-Eliaz, Sommer & Rubin (2009) is based on the Collective Effort Model, created by Karau and Williams (1993): It assumes that one’s commitment in processing a task,

individually or in a group, is related to the perception of how its effort will be worthwhile in terms of pay offs (e.g., pay, perspective of future promotions);

Transposed in the LO context, an affiliation hypothesis is verified if the ostracised person perceive a positive correspondence, and so it will work hard to reduce its gaps with the colleagues;

Otherwise a disengagement hypothesis arises if there is not that perception of effort fulfilment.

Linguistic Ostracism (1)


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Two more indicators were integrated in the experiment: Social Self-Efficacy (SSE): the self-rated

ability of an individual to relate with other people;

Rejection Sensitivity (RS): the tendency to overreact to rejection, such as the one caused by LO.

Linguistic Ostracism (2)


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High SSE was related with low negative affect and anger. The opposite is valid for high RS;

Affiliation hypothesis is verified for people high in SSE and low in RS;

Disengagement hypothesis is valid for people low in SSE and high in RS;

Negative correlation between LO exposure and indicators such as team potency, co-worker attraction and creative performance.

Linguistic Ostracism: Results


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Language can act as a way for more fluent workers to gain power and improve their status in the MNC.The research that better underline this bond is the one by Marschan-Piekkari, Welch and Welch (1999), a case study on a Finnish MNC.

Language as a source of power


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1) They point out the role of the expatriate, a figure able to speak both the corporate language (English) both the parent language (Finnish):

◦ It is able to act as an intermediary for its co-workers in their relations with the superiors;

◦ It can get earlier and more easily access to important information. One interviewee even talked about that as a “Finnish mafia”, according to which Finns form an elite that restricts to itself the information sharing within the organization.

Marschan-Piekkari et al’s findings (1)


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2) Also foreigners can obtain advantages from that condition:

◦ The experience of a Spanish employee who, because of his excellent English fluency was sent to meetings and training courses although he didn’t have the status to attend them.

Marschan-Piekkari et al’s findings (2)


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Brannen, Moore and Mughan (2013) stated that performance is related to more tangible aspects such as the tenure in the firm;

Watson, Kumar and Michaelsen (1993) demonstrated that language issues can be overcome by a prolonged team work experience.

But language is not an issue for every researcher…


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To overcome language differences resorting to routines to standardise some processes.One of these can be the adoption of a lingua franca; but take care of the fact that a standardised communication “can only be achieved by doing violence to very important cultural practices within other groups” (Henderson, 2005, p. 75).

Managerial implications (1)


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To avoid the presence in the team of weak corporate language speakers in the recruiting process require the applicants to submit certifications that ensure their fluent knowledge of the corporate language, (Marshan-Piekkari, Welch, & Welch, 1999, b), paying attention not to leave the impaired person alone in the team;Or temporally transfer expatriates to the problematic team in order to facilitate communication in the first steps of its life (ibid.).



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The MNC should organise language training programs for the employees (teaching not only the basic of the corporate language, but also the MNC’s organizational culture);



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Lack of generalization: It’s hard to classify the effect of such an abstract characteristic as language through standardised methods most of the studies are qualitative analysis of few companies, or even case studies;

Difficulty in establishing causality between the two variables (language asymmetry and performance);

Solution: Quantitative researches on a wider range of companies.

Limitations and further developments (1)


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Performance is always described only by measuring the internal processes and interactions of a language diverse team;

Solution: Take into consideration the outcomes of their tasks, and compare them with homogeneous teams ones.

Language as a faultline is often analysed independently from other features;

Solution: Combine language with other demographic characteristics to show how they influence each other.

Limitations and further development (2)


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Successfully mastering the issue of language allow a MNC to obtain some important results: Information is able to flow within a team without

any constraint; Less individual social exclusion; More involved participation in the communications; No clashes and subgroups between team

members; Equally distributed power inside the team; Improvement of corporate climate and better

performance.

Conclusion


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University of Tubingen, Department of International Business

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Brannen, M. Y., Moore, F., & Mughan, T. (2013). Strategic ethnography and reinvigorating Tesco Plc: Leveraging inside/out bicultural bridging in multicultural teams. In EPIC 2013 London. Proceedings of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference; 15–18 September, London, 255–272. Arlington, VA: American anthropological Association.

Dotan-Eliaz, O., Sommer, K. L., & Rubin Y. S. (2009). Multilingual groups: Effects of linguistic ostracism on felt rejection and anger, coworker attraction, perceived team potency, and creative performance. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 31 (4), 363-375.

Henderson, J. K. (2005). Language diversity in international management teams. International Studies of Management & Organization, 35 (1), 66-82.

Hinds, P. J., Neeley, T., & Cramton, C. D. (2013). Language as a lightning rod: Power contests, emotion regulation, and subgroup dynamics in global teams. Journal of International Business Studies (2014), 45 (5), 536-561.

Jehn, K. A., & Bezrukova, K. (2010). The faultline activation process and the effects of activated faultlines on coalition formation, conflict, and group outcomes. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 112, 24-42.

Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 681-706.

Bibliography (1)

University of Tubingen, Department of International Business

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Marschan-Piekkari, R., Welch D., & Welch, L. (1999). In the shadow: the impact of language on structure, power and communication in the multinational. International Business Review, 8 (4), 421-440.

Marschan-Piekkari, R., Welch D., & Welch, L. (1999). Adopting a common corporate language: IHRM implications. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 10, 377-390.

Piekkari, R., Oxelheim, L., & Randoy, T. (2014). The silent board: How language diversity may influence the work processes of corporate boards. Corporate Governance: An International Review (2015), 23(1), 25–41.

SanAntonio, P. M., (1987). Social mobility and language use in an American company in Japan. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 6 (3-4), 191-200.

Watson W. E., Kumar K., & Michaelsen L. K. (1993). Cultural diversity's impact on interaction process and performance: Comparing homogeneous and diverse task groups. The Academy of Management Journal, 36 (3), 590-602.

Bibliography (2)

language diversity and its impact on team performance

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