The emotional impact of mixed proficiency levels in the corporate language in multinational teams

Many businesses are becoming increasingly complex and reliant on the performance of their multinational teams. Large corporations generally assume that the invocation of a language mandate to share information with subsidiaries resolves all communication issues. The requirement to speak a foreign language with other team members can give rise to misunderstandings and barriers to knowledge sharing. Language diversity in a work environment triggers significant emotional challenges. Research has identified a form of circumstantial anxiety reaction, explicitly resulting from communication in a non-native tongue, contributing to the formation of a language barrier and constituting a threat to team collaboration. This study investigates the impact of language-induced emotions in multinational teams resulting from a corporate language mandate. It does this through two qualitative studies. It identifies significant problems in communication between managers with different mother tongues and suggests effective strategies to resolve them. In contrast to previous studies focusing on industry sectors with lower reported proficiency levels, this study focuses on the consultancy services sector, which has the highest reported proficiency level. The research shows that even in the sector with the highest reported linguistic proficiency level, multilingual teams still experience collaborative difficulties caused by language differences and associated emotions. However, this study also suggests effective ways to mitigate these problems. The first qualitative study uses semi-structured interviews with two global teams from two multinational corporations in Information Technology consultancy services. The analysis identifies several issues including loss of information, ambiguity over equivalence of meaning, variability in sociolinguistic competence as well as problems of adjustment to cultural norms. The second study takes the form of a focus group, comprising members of several global teams from different multinational corporations from the consultancy services sector, and endorses the issues identified in the first study with an interesting shift in emphasis caused by the group dynamic. The research also identified several lingua-culturally adaptive behavioural strategies relating to international leadership, including the need for multinational team leaders to become more conscious of and reflect on the emotional impact of mixed proficiency level speakers of the corporate language in their teams. Finally, this study suggests effective ways for multinational team leaders to leverage the linguistic and cultural diversity of their team members to produce a more productive team environment.