Multinational teams come in many different forms, from diverse teams in club football to musical ensembles, product development teams, or engineering and consulting teams. Many professionals collaborate in such multinational teams, me included, which means that they need to agree on a common language to be able to converse and get work done. Most multinational teams adopt the official language their company has stipulated, especially if this is the only language that all multinational team members can speak. In the majority of cases this is English. But in a diverse workforce, there may be other languages a multinational team may adopt in their team interactions, even if the team ultimately serves internal and external clients in the official corporate language.
Evidence suggests that proficiency in English as a foreign language differs widely in global companies, so how beneficial is it for multinational team members to be fluent in the official language? To which extent does it give members status and informal influence in the team? And how does the choice of language a multinational team uses for internal team meetings and discussions influence these benefits?
My colleague Felipe Guzman and I decided to find out. We conducted two field studies and two experiments to examine whether multinational team members’ fluency in the official corporate language provides them with more status from their peers, and whether this elevated status in turn would give them more informal influence in their team. There are different ways of how members exert informal influence in multinational teams: they may voice more ideas, they may contribute with higher-quality suggestions, and they may emerge as informal leaders in their team. Importantly, we also studied whether the language the team adopted in their internal meetings—which we label the team’s dominant language—influenced the relationship between fluency in the official language and informal influence via status. We tested this relationship in different language contexts, varying both the official corporate language (English vs. Spanish) and the team’s dominant language (French vs. German).
Key findings
Across the four studies we demonstrated the following:
- Fluency in the official corporate language is related to higher peer-granted status.
- The team’s dominant language influences how members grant status in multinational teams. Specifically, the relationship between official language fluency and peer-granted status is stronger in teams whose members primarily converse in a shared non-corporate language.
- Members fluent in the official language communicate more and better ideas than their less fluent peers, and they are more likely to emerge as team leaders than their less fluent peers.
In short, it pays off for team members to be fluent in the official language because it carries positive status effects. But members’ foreign language proficiency also benefits their teams through more constructive ideas and shared leadership, and ultimately the wider organization.
Managerial implications
Our study has several implications for organizations seeking to improve their multinational team functioning:
- There are several benefits for individual team members, multinational teams, and the wider organization from increasing the general level of proficiency in the official corporate language. This requires support for foreign language learning but also accounting for foreign language fluency in hiring, promotion and other staffing decisions.
- Because less fluent members still hold relevant expertise, it is important to establish mechanisms for less fluent peers to contribute. Most importantly, this will require more inclusive approaches to solicit and listen to their ideas and input. For example, teams may solicit anonymized input from their members before it is shared in the team to mitigate language-induced status differences.
- There are also alternative, technology-based measures to draw on the ideas of less fluent members. For example, multinational teams can gather input from their members in their respective native language before translating it into the official language. As AI-based tools become more sophisticated, they can help with both written and spoken communication.
Language permeates every aspect of our experience at work, from our sense of professional competence, task execution, social hierarchies to emotions and identity. Understanding how foreign language fluency can be harnessed to improve rather than obstruct effective collaboration is a critical capability for global organizations.
Further reading
Guzman, F. A., & Reiche, B. S. (2024). A chorus of different tongues: Official corporate language fluency and informal influence in multinational teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 182, 104334.