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

•Fluency in the official corporate language is associated with higher peer-granted status.•The team dominant language affects how members grant status in multinational teams.•Fluent members communicate more and better ideas than their less fluent peers.•Fluent members are more likely to emerge as te...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inOrganizational behavior and human decision processes Vol. 182; p. 104334
Main Authors Guzman, Felipe A., Reiche, B. Sebastian
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.05.2024
Elsevier
Subjects
Economics and Finance
Humanities and Social Sciences
Informal influence
Language
Leadership emergence
Multinational teams
Status
Voice
Status
Informal influence
Multinational teams
Language
Voice
Leadership emergence
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Summary:•Fluency in the official corporate language is associated with higher peer-granted status.•The team dominant language affects how members grant status in multinational teams.•Fluent members communicate more and better ideas than their less fluent peers.•Fluent members are more likely to emerge as team leaders than their less fluent peers. Multinational team members commonly face challenges to influence their peers to attain shared work goals in a language different from their mother tongue. However, the mechanisms linking multinational team members’ official corporate language fluency and their displays of informal influence are not well understood. Drawing from status characteristics theory, we propose that peer-granted status mediates the relationship between fluency in the official corporate language and informal influence. We tested this prediction across two field studies and two experiments utilizing three different operationalizations of informal influence: voice behavior, voice quality, and leadership emergence. Overall, we demonstrate that members fluent in the official corporate language receive higher peer-granted status than their less fluent peers, and this relationship is stronger in teams whose members primarily converse in a common non-corporate language. In turn, high-status members engage in voice more frequently, and are more likely to convey voice quality and emerge as leaders.
ISSN:0749-5978
1095-9920
DOI:10.1016/j.obhdp.2024.104334