06.06.2016

New technology will make it easier to work in multilingual teams

Helene Tenzer and Markus Pudelko suggest ways to improve multinational team communication

The London School of Economics and Political Sience

Business Review

When speaking on the phone, non-native speakers of a virtual team’s working language need to process a foreign language, understand different accents and immediately respond to their conversation partner. If their communication is dealing with highly complex topics, the need to master linguistic challenges while simultaneously thinking and deciding about the task can easily create cognitive overload. To avoid these stressful situations, many members of multilingual teams prefer to communicate through email. Asynchronous and written exchanges allow them to compose messages in the foreign language at their own pace, to look up words in online dictionaries and to think about the responses they receive at rest. This strategy certainly relieves team members’ brains for the moment, but it creates a daily flood of emails, which many find difficult to cope with.

Based on 54 interviews with the leaders and members of 13 global virtual teams in three automotive and three IT multinationals, we found that new communication technologies could resolve this dilemma. More: <link http: blogs.lse.ac.uk businessreview new-technology-will-make-it-easier-to-work-in-multilingual-teams>blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2016/06/03/new-technology-will-make-it-easier-to-work-in-multilingual-teams/

This article is based on the authors’ paper <link http: www.palgrave-journals.com jibs journal v47 n4 abs jibs201613a.html>Media choice in multilingual virtual teams, Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 47, Issue 4, 427-452. DOI: 10.1057/jibs.2016.13