Revisiting culture and language in global management teams

Abstract

In research on international business (IB) and management, a narrow view of language and culture has given way to a greater understanding of the complexity of the interplay of language- and culture-related issues in today’s world. The “linguistic turn” in the social sciences along with the more recent unravelling of the deterministic cultural dimension has led to reexamining the importance of language and culture in the social construction of reality. The key role played by multicultural, multilingual teams in organizations operating on a global scale has spawned much research on the impact of language and cultural diversity within teams. Some scholars 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 scholars 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 IB and management studies. Applying these emerging notions to a study of a multilingual team in an international organization, we question the widely held assumptions about language, culture, and identity and show the need to refresh the way in which these concepts are framed when examining team performance.