Managing Linguistic Diversity in Multinational Companies

Managing Linguistic Diversity in Multinational Companies

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Description

Multinational companies generally adopt a corporate lingua franca, often English, to manage linguistic diversity and create a common platform for communication within and among their globally dispersed business units. What happens when linguistically diverse employees in a given unit vary widely in their command of the corporate lingua franca? This presentation highlights two recent studies that show how employees manage this informally: by developing English language advice networks to get their work done, and by drawing on individual linguistic repertoires across multiple languages to effectively communicate with one another. The research has implications for social integration, knowledge sharing, and inclusivity in the contemporary multicultural workplace.

About the Author

Carol Reade is a professor in the School of Management in the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business. Her field is international management, centered on the global mobility of employees and their lived experiences in multicultural, multilingual, and challenging environments. She and her coauthors received the Academy of Management’s 2024 Carolyn B. Dexter Award for best international paper on the topic of language diversity. Her work is published in the Journal of Management, Journal of International Management, Journal of International Business Policy, among others. She has been a visiting professor at Sophia University and Kyoto University, Japan, Postgraduate Institute of Management, Sri Lanka, University of Göttingen, Germany, and the London School of Economics, UK.

Date of Event

Fall 9-9-2026

Keywords

Multinational company, Lingustic idversity, Multicultural workplace, Global Corporate

Disciplines

Business Administration, Management, and Operations

Comments

1 streaming video file (56 min.) : digital, sound, color. Closed-captioned for the hearing-impaired.

Managing Linguistic Diversity in Multinational Companies

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