New articles in OBHDP (April 17th, 2024)

A chorus of different tongues: Official corporate language fluency and informal influence in multinational teams

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597824000268

Felipe A. Guzman, B. Sebastian Reiche

Members of multinational teams often have differing levels of fluency in the official corporate language (e.g., an employee from Spain in a Spain-based organization is likely to be more fluent than an employee whose first language is German). This article explores how an employee’s fluency level in the official corporate language impacts the informal influence they have within the organization. The authors theorize—and demonstrate across two field studies and two experiments—that employees with higher fluency are granted more status by their peers. This status-granting process leads higher-fluency employees to more frequently engage in voice (constructive suggestions for change). Fluency also has a substantial impact on how voice is perceived. Peers indicated that more fluent employees provided higher-quality voice and were more likely to be a good team leader. The authors provide several recommendations to help multinational organizations ensure that team members’ fluency does not unduly influence their opportunities to voice nor how team members perceive that voice.

P.S. if you can’t access the full-text let us (m-kouchaki@kellogg.northwestern.edu or mikebaer@asu.edu) know and we’d be happy to share a copy.