Globalization - Diverse Languages Environment

Introduction

There is no doubt that globalization is a common phenomenon currently, and it is one of the main factors driving the transformation of business, many companies have enlarged their scope of business on an international scale due to globalization (Chanlat, et al., 2013). A growing number of companies have a good business not only in their own countries but also beyond their original countries. However, the number is still limited because of several complicated reasons, one of them is the linguistic or cultural difference, which is inevitable when companies want to expand their operations into other countries and this difference will cause a number of problems, such as low-efficiency communication between employees from different countries. In order to overcome such barriers, the English-only policy is widely used by multinational companies (MNCs). However, it will also post a negative effect on the passion of some employees in the company. This essay will highlight some difficulties that linguistic /cultural differences create within the firm firstly, then introduce the advantage and disadvantage of English-only policy, the idea of the author will present at the end of the essay.

Difficulties

The Linguistic difference may pose a threat on the communication efficiency between employees from different countries. As companies expand internationally, it is common to see employees from diverse countries in the organization. Because of the different countries and different culture, communication frequently involves misunderstanding (Adler, 1991; Usunier, 1993). According to the interactive model put forward by Schramm in 1955, during the communication process, the sender send the message to the receiver via a certain channel, the receiver will decode the information via his/her own way to understand the message, and then send back to sender, then the same process to sender. It is clear that the more two cultures differ, the more difficult for employees from these two countries to understand each other because the way of decoding between them is different, therefore, this phenomenon will increase the risk of communication misunderstanding (Asheghian & Ebrahimi, 1990; Hall, 1960 in Hays, Korth & Roudiani, 1972; Terpstra, 1972). Such facts can be supported by Kone Elevators, the percentage of foreign employees out of total employment had risen to 92% in 1996 (Kone Annual Report, 1996). The evidence for difficulties of operating business in the multilingual environment can be found from interview data: 57% of interviewees demonstrated that language is a barrier, especially for the lower levels in the organization, language usually negatively affect communication among employees. Therefore, in order to have a good international business, organizations should overcome the communication problems.

Diverse languages environment negatively influence team building and trust in multinational teams (Henderson, 2005). Teams operating business across cultures and languages are a key characteristic of current business environment, especially in multinational companies, however, a number of researches have revealed many challenges they face (Schweiger et al., 2003; Lagerstrom and Andersson, 2003; Maznevski and Chudoba, 2000; Salk and Brannen, 2000; Goodall and Roberts, 2003). Some of them are negative effect on team building and trust, working across languages increase the obstacles and tensions on employees, difficulties not only include the encoding and decoding the messages employees sent and received, but also in the area of interpersonal perception and opinions from unfamiliar and unexpected communication patterns, employees from different countries use different interpretive mechanism to understand things because of different background, and individuals often do not pay attention that they are not sharing the same interpretation of particular information (Henderson, 2005), for example, when British employees ask Chinese employees to book a return ticket, Chinese people may just book the ticket for coming back, because from Chinese perspective, return just means coming back while it means going and coming back for British people, this phenomenon pose a threat on the daily communication, relationship between team members and the spirit of the team. In contrast, teams from just one country are more likely to be successful and easier to create a shared value (Earley & Mosakowki, 2000), which is good for building trust and relationship in teams. Therefore, the more diverse the languages in the team, the more difficult to build trust and relationship in the team.

Language or cultural difference may prevent the growing speed of the business of multinational companies. As the trend of globalization, people will never know what kind of people they will do business with, where do they come from and what kind of business they do, so it has a high extent of uncertainty whether both sides can share their language (Feely and Harzing, 2003). If both sides communicate in the different language, it is less possible for them to communicate fluently even come to an agreement. In consequence, companies are more likely to do business with those speak the same language, this will definitely pose a threat on global expansion. Even for those companies already entered in the market which speak different language, gap between each culture may also negatively influence its business and reputation in local market, P & G give an example in 2005 ( Liu, 2011), a customer charged P & G because her skin was burnt after using SK-II, one of their produce, P & G just invited a famous artist from Hong Kong to said I am glad to support SK-II and release an apology to people, but P & G insisted that our product is quality-guaranteed, this behavior annoyed Chinese people. According to the cultural dimension put forward by Hofstede in 1983, Chinese culture emphasize on collectivism and modesty while America focuses on individualism, the cultural difference influence the decision-making of P & G. Therefore, it is necessary for multinational companies to be aware of the importance of language and cultural difference if they want to expand business internationally.

Advantages of English-only policy

Adopting English as a common company language is key for effective knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing in the multinational companies (Marschan-Piekkari et al., 1999a). It has been proved that knowledge sharing can lead to a better performance of organizations because of improved decision making and better coordination (Zarraga and Bonache, 2003). For the multinational companies, the knowledge is more comprehensive because demographic is connected with cognitive diversity, which expands multinational companies’ knowledge