Perspectives

Language as a lightning rod

I am going to start this review with a paper by Pamela Hinds, Tsedal Neely and Catherine Durnell Cramton published in the Journal of International Business Studies (Hinds et al., 2014). The full title is Language as a lightning rod: Power contests, emotion regulation, and subgroup dynamics in global teams and that neatly sums up the issues that are covered in other papers I am reviewing. My reasons for selecting this paper are that it was arguably the first to explore in depth the emotional outcomes of language diversity and that the research project presented in the paper is one of the most comprehensive and rigorous I have come across in this area of research.

A five-person research team conducted ethnographic interviews and observations at a large high-tech multinational company, GlobalTech (a pseudonym), headquartered in Germany. GlobalTech officially adopted English as its lingua franca two years prior to this study. Operationally, the rule required that official verbal and written communication occur in English, so that employees from various language backgrounds could interact and collaborate. The team travelled to two cities in Germany, one in India and three cities in the US to conduct interviews with 96 informants involved in six projects within GlobalTech. However, the employees involved in the project represented many more countries. The informants in the German office of GlobalTech, for instance, included people from several regions of Germany, as well as from places as distant as the US, Tunisia and India. The Indian location included informants from many different parts of India. Finally, the US office of GlobalTech included informants from China, India, Germany, Pakistan and Australia. Moreover, the research took place concurrently so that any background issues of business change (for example) could be excluded from the results. This is why the project is of so much value because this national diversity is very common in all organizations and not just large multinational corporations.

The paper runs to 26 pages and it is not possible to do due justice in a short summary. In their own summary of the paper, the authors noted that managers need to understand the communication challenges that people face when they have a mix of native, bilingual and professional competence in the lingua franca. Managers also need to understand the probable coping strategies that workers may employ, which may involve withdrawal, exclusion and code-switching for less confident English speakers and leaving, asking for translations or requesting that English be used for more fluent and confident English speakers. Perhaps more importantly, identifying persistent activating forces, such as power contests, and helping to alleviate the sense of threat and fear that accompany these dynamics would go a long way to reduce subgroup dynamics and, in turn, create the conditions for more empathic responses to language asymmetries.

You may be wondering about the inclusion of a lightning rod in the title of the paper. The answer lies in the final paragraph of the paper. The authors state that in their opinion language asymmetries aligned with geographic distribution can contribute to a potent fault line in global teams and, when activated by power contests, draw emotions like a lightning rod, thus fueling a negative affective state that radiates tension across locations in these global teams and triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of language-related behaviours that fuel an us vs them dynamic. That is why this paper and the research set out below should be essential reading for any manager.

Language in global management and business

To return to Sage Publishing, the papers in the April special issue of the International Journal of Cross Cultural Management were selected among the 41 papers presented at the 9th International Conference of GEM&L (https://geml.eu/en; an international research group on management and language) at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki in 2015. Each contributes to language-sensitive research in global management and business by expanding the theoretical foundations of language use in cross-cultural management. Building on the seminal studies mentioned above, these articles suggest ways that language and cross-cultural management scholars can work together on themes such as team dynamics, power relations, corporate language strategies and the role of translators in the transfer of knowledge.

The co-editors were Betty Beeler, Linda Cohen, Dardo de Vecchi, Jane Kassis-Henderson and Philippe Lecomte, all based at leading management schools in France. This is a benefit because it removes any English-centric assessment of the issues, something I have seen in some of the related research published in the US journals. They have chosen papers that address three main themes, cross-cultural team dynamics, power relations in a cross-cultural context and corporate language policies. The co-editor introduction (Beeler et al., 2017) though quite short provides an important introduction in showing that there are many themes arising from the use of multiple languages. I have not included all the papers in this column and I would note that there is, for example, little attention paid to what is now regarded as computational sociolinguistics, a discipline essential to digital discovery of social content in organizations.

Corporate common language

In their paper, Language attitudes and intergroup dynamics in multilingual organizations, Woo and Giles (2017) examine the benefits and problems in adopting a corporate common language (CCL). This paper is a review of the literature and not based on a case study but is none the less important to take into consideration. They make the point that when multinational companies operate in multiple languages and have employees from various linguistic backgrounds, adopting a CCL – or language standardization – can invoke intergroup issues such as bias and stereotypes. Granted using a CCL has obvious benefits for multinational companies, such as facilitating a formal reporting process and assisting the sense of connectedness between different units in disperse locations but ‘companies do not have languages, people do’, and in multinational companies with a CCL, communication challenges and tensions can be concealed by the fact that everyone speaks the same language in the workplace even though there may seem (especially to an English-fluent senior executive team) significant benefits. Although not considered in this paper, I often wonder if CCL decisions are more of a reflection of a need for convenience to senior executives than to all the other employees in the organization.

The three topics the authors consider are (a) challenges in building organizational cohesion; (b) discrimination, perceived unfairness, and social exclusion; and (c) leader–member exchange qualities and favouritism. After a discussion of each, they conclude with some recommendations for managers. The first is that that managers encourage and train employees to adopt accommodative speech-style strategies when interacting with other organizational members in a CCL. Such strategies can include making genuine efforts to take the cultural perspective of others, avoiding exclusionary communication (e.g. asking where someone is ‘really’ from when hearing a nonnative speaker of a CCL speak, indicating that the person is not believed to be in the same cultural or organizational boundary) or considering others’ communicative needs (e.g. recognizing that one’s use of a specific word may require extra explanations to receive an appropriate response).

Their second recommendation is that managers should remind their multilingual speakers of the organizational mission and explain why/how their collaboration with others is crucial for achieving the shared goals, in meetings or via other available communication channels. This comes down to the issue of code-switching, which is discussed in the next paper. The final recommendation is that managers should be aware that the language they use can have impacts on how their relationships with subordinates are formed and perceived by others. Also, if leaders assign tasks to native speakers of a CCL based on language proficiency – or if they are believed to have done so even if it is not true – nonnative speakers can interpret it as an unfair opportunity.

Corporate language policies: Embrace or resist

Following on from the paper on CCL, a paper by Lønsmann (2017) examines how one Danish multinational company implemented a corporate language policy. Despite the volumes of research on English as a corporate language, very little has been written about the process of making a language policy and the implementation of such policies in multinational organizations. The aim of this paper is to contribute with knowledge that will increase an understanding of the relationship between language diversity and language policy but also to contribute with knowledge which will aid the implementation of corporate language policies in organizations. The author presents a study of language policy implementation as one kind of cross-cultural management in organizations by exploring when and why corporate language policies encounter resistance.

The case company is a Danish engineering company where English is being introduced as the corporate language. Danes are generally considered very proficient in English. Research shows that 66 per cent of Danes reporting that that they use their ‘first other language’, which is overwhelmingly likely to be English, daily or often. So in that respect, this case study, which is based on a series of focus groups, could be regarded as a bit of an outlier. The case company CONSULT (pseudonym) is a Danish-based engineering and consulting company with 12,000 employees and operations in 57 countries. Since the coming of a new CEO in 2012, CONSULT has been on an internationalization journey with increased international revenue and more offshoring in India as key strategic priorities. This strategic focus on globalization and on increased internal collaboration is reflected in the two slogans introduced by the new CEO: ‘Stronger together’ and ‘One company’.

The Danish part of the organization, here pseudonymized as CONSULT DK, has 3000 employees distributed across the Copenhagen headquarters and 12 regional offices. CONSULT DK has mainly Danish customers and Danish employees. At the end of 2012, one of the executive directors for CONSULT DK initiated a language strategy project with the aim of implementing English as a corporate language ‘for real’, as one informant put it. While English had been the corporate language in CONSULT for a number of years, no explicit language strategy or policy existed. In 2013, a group of HR and communication employees were tasked with the new language strategy project. They began their work by ‘taking the temperature in the Danish organisation’ (as one of the group put it) with regard to the use of English. They did this by carrying out interviews with employees as well as a questionnaire survey. While the aim of management was to make a shift towards more English, specifically to have all top-down communication in English only, the project group found a lot of resistance among the employees and argued for ‘a soft transition’ where Danish and English would be used in parallel in 2014–2015. From January 2016, all top-down information would be in English only.

The level of analysis is quite detailed, with direct quotes from discussions in the focus groups. I just what to pick out two of the outcomes. One factor influencing stances towards English is the temporal perspective taken by employees. Most employees most of time focus on the immediate perspective, that is, they want to do their job this week and they want to finish the deadline they have this month. They run on tight schedules and have to log how they spend their time. From this perspective, the introduction of more English is just making their lives more difficult. As a result, employees take a stance of resisting English. However, while all informants agreed that there is no immediate need for English in their departments at present, some informants take a more positive stance toward English when they consider a long-term strategic perspective. The central argument is that ‘English has to make sense’.

This strategic viewpoint while younger informants tend to be more open toward making changes in order to fit into CONSULT in the future, for example, by improving their English, older informants are typically more hesitant to embrace the change. The younger employees seem to accept that they will have to adapt in a number of ways to keep up with developments, including linguistic developments. Employees nearing retirement have the option of leaving the workforce altogether if demands increase beyond the tolerable. Ambition also plays a role here. Employees who want to move on to bigger projects and more responsibility will focus on the individual strategic relevance of English and embrace it for that reason, while employees who either have already reached a management position or have no ambitions to move up in the organization focus on the immediate situation where they find no reason to embrace English. Again this comes back to the point that English has to make sense, if not now then at least in the long term. Hence, the short-term versus long-term, or immediate versus strategic, perspective becomes another factor influencing how employees react to the new language strategy.

Code-switching

Code-switching in the workplace has been defined as changing from the common working language of the international company or international team to the use of another language that other members of the company or team may or may not speak or even understand. This is what was happening in the case study I recounted in the introduction to this column. Oliver and Spencer-Oately (2017) note in their paper code-switching in newly formed multinational project teams: challenges, strategies and effects that management research has tended to address these issues as a sideline and there has been very limited experimental research into multinational project teams from a language adoption perspective.

This paper moves back to a classic case-study methodology. The authors conducted the research in an Multi National Company (MNC) located in France and obtained data involving three newly formed multicultural teams carrying out four problem-solving tasks within a management integration programme. In this programme, and among other activities, participants were put into problem-solving teams, using English as a common language to find solutions to four corporate issues. To complete their tasks, the teams needed to establish team-working practices to help them handle their interactive processes. In each case study, they considered the challenges pertaining to the impact of code-switching, that is, the use of asides in French, the practices and strategies the teams used to manage these switches, and the effects and effectiveness of these (You will now see why I used a French example in my introduction!).

The outcomes are interesting. To me what is notable is that the process of code-switching and the reaction of the team members who perhaps could now not understand the conversation and messages, varied considerably between the teams. Some smiled at the French asides and put it down to the French being French and in other cases, team members would shout out ‘In English’ when this code-switching took place. The study shows that all teams experienced similar code-switching challenges, but that they each developed their own unique strategies for handling these and that the impact of both the challenges and the strategies affected the teams in different ways. The strong message that comes out of this research, and is something that I have seen in practice working with French, German and Swedish teams, is that the teams recognize that this code-switching may take place, often inadvertently due to stress of a situation, and that the team, not the organization, has to agree and self-govern how code-switching will be accommodated with the way the team works.

Boundary spanning

I now want to move to the ultimate edge of multiple languages in project teams. Global project work has also become increasingly important in the offshore outsourcing context, for example, when employees of large information technology (IT) vendor organizations from India and other emerging economies are located in offices around the world to address the needs of their organizations’ major clients. These vendor managers are expected to engage constructively with multiple overlapping boundaries (organizational, regional, national, linguistic and professional); they are the key actors in a successful collaboration.

Søderberg and Laurence (2017) investigated how Indian vendor managers collaborate with major Western clients in projects that led to the transformation of a relationship in which both partners are strong. They consider the boundary-spanning activities in which the vendor managers engage in the global development of the advanced IT services and strategic business solutions they offer to their clients. By adopting a focus on these (micro)practices and a sensitivity to context, they aim to shed light on the interdependence of the partners’ status and specific boundary-spanning activities and roles.

The paper is based around three projects undertaken by an Indian IT services vendor and three global organizations. However, for reasons that are not given in the paper, only one of these (where the boundary spanning role was especially important) is presented. So all of the empirical illustrations are taken from 22 interviews with Indian ‘onsite’ and ‘offshore’ vendor managers involved in close collaboration with a major European client, anonymized as Eurobank. Then, as the project progressed and some of the research from Eurobank seemed to be conflicting in its outcomes, the authors returned to the research they had carried out in the two other case studies. The result is a paper which is a bit of a muddle in terms of analysis and outcomes. Language is a component here, and one of the characteristics of Indian companies is that most employees, and especially managers, speak English very quickly and with accentuation which can make interpretation difficult. Very few Indians speak other European languages. I have included it in this column because there is a wealth of information about how relationships developed between the vendor and the IT services vendor which should be of interest to any IT department working on, or planning, large scale projects with Indian outsourcing contractors.

Global management teams

Let me move on from IT outsourcing to consider a paper by Cohen and Kassis-Henderson (2017) on aspects of culture and management in global management teams. What I like about this paper is that there is a balanced view of the issues and in particular the outcomes. The authors reflect on the fact that some academics have focused on the negative aspects of diversity implying that language standardization, through the adoption of lingua franca policies and practices, is the most appropriate strategy for collaboration across languages and borders. Others have uncovered the positive side of this diversity; they argue the case for the coexistence of different working languages together with communication practices that facilitate the contextualization necessary for sense-making processes in multilingual teams. This has led a growing number of academics within different research fields to take the ‘multilingual turn’ exploring novel ideas and concepts emerging around the phenomena of multilingualism, thereby advancing the discussion in international business and management studies.

The research on which this paper is based is taken from an ongoing case study of a multicultural, multilingual management team in a European business school. With the internationalization of higher education institutions, studies of language and culture issues concerning students and faculty are increasing in number but, to the knowledge of the authors, no studies exist of the management teams that work across international borders in universities and business schools. The team studied for this paper manages one of the master’s level programmes. It consists of 15 members, representing 10 nationalities. All team members speak at least one language in addition to their native tongue. There are no native English speakers on the team at the time of the study, which turned out to be a significant factor in the context of this study. Moreover, the team is geographically dispersed as the institution has campuses and runs integrated programmes in five European countries: France, the UK, Germany, Spain and Italy. In addition, certain operations are coordinated with partner universities and business schools located in the US, Mexico, India, Russia and Thailand. A micro version of many much larger international organizations!

The findings from the interviews show that, far from viewing language as a barrier, there is an affirmative will, on the team level, to use languages in their diversity as an explicit resource. Differences are embraced and confronted positively, as one member puts it ‘the team is positively stressed’. Overall, our data indicate that the competences of the team members are not primarily due to their country-specific skills (knowledge of culture and language – as exhibited in cultural frame-switching behaviour) but are to a large part due to their wider language-general and culture-general skills or multilingua franca mindset. In my view, this is an important outcome that balances the research presented in other papers in this column. This is not to say that the research highlighting conflict is not well grounded. The issue is one about understanding the full context of the project team and organization, recognizing where linguistic diversity causes fault lines and also where it can result in an enhanced contribution from members of a team. It is the same situation as with the code-switching paper above.

The authors conclude their paper with an important statement.

Our findings are relevant for human resources in organizations, particularly, recruitment criteria, foreign assignments, and training. We show that excellent proficiency in a given language (as testified by test scores obtained) may be less significant than wider metacognitive skills gained through exposure to multiple languages and cultures. Individuals tend to be identified in the workplace by labels – nationality, native speaker, monolingual, bilingual, etc. – which hide the multiple intersecting aspects of their identity. If these were to be taken into account, this complexity and diversity within and between individuals could be tapped as a resource having direct and positive implications for global organizations’.

My perspective

I do not usually write a summary at the end of this column because of the range of topics I’ve included but this column is rather different. What I have seen in the outcomes of the research published in these papers is totally in line with my own experience over almost 40 years of working in and for multinational companies. In particular, my work in intranets since 1998 has meant I am often working with people who are quite low down the organizational hierarchy and do not walk in to work each day inspired by the CEO’s vision statement. Then more recently, my work in enterprise search highlights the existence of documents in far more languages than any of the senior managers appreciate. In one recent case, an enterprise search engine tracked down 11 documents in Latin. These documents turned out to be drafts of content for a new website and used Lorem Ipsum as text filler. The search engine assumed they were in Latin.

It does not take long to realize that as far as language use is concerned there are no ‘rules’. The onus is on managers, with informed support from HR, to be alert for potential lighting rod situations. These situations may be well concealed, especially if there is an explicit or even implicit corporate common language. Ignoring them or hoping that employees will ‘see sense’ is a recipe for fraction and a significant loss of performance, which may result in the loss of the employee.

What I hope that what this column shows is that from a research perspective, there is much more evidence about what causes the fraction and how to redress the situation. The sooner the outcome of this research filters through to multinational organizations, the better for the organization, its employees and its customers.