Language barriers in different forms of international assignments

Abstract

International business activities are always accompanied by language-related barriers as companies are confronted with multiple local languages and a multinational workforce. To increase the efficiency of corporate communication, documentation and cross-national teamwork, an increasing number of companies have implemented common language policies in both their headquarters and their foreign subsidiaries and made English their official corporate language. However, introducing a common corporate language also creates friction among a multinational firm’s workforce and is fraught with challenges. To deepen our understanding of the language-related barriers that expatriates experience during international assignments, this study takes different tasks expatriates have to execute while being abroad into account and shows which types of international assignments are particularly vulnerable to the language effects. In particular, the study reveals that language causes negative emotional responses among employees of multinational corporations, restrains a common social identity, constitutes an obstacle to trust building and distorts organizational power relations. Finally, the study illustrates that not only a low absolute language proficiency of expatriates and local colleagues but also relative differences in proficiency levels among the multinational corporation’s workforce can hamper expatriate success.