Given that most multinational corporations (MNCs) are also multilingual, the management of language barriers constitutes a key leadership challenge in these companies Despite the fact that languages are “the basic means of communication in organizations [and] the basis for knowledge creation”, language barriers have surprisingly long been neglected both by researchers and prac- titioners. Only recently have management scholars started to explore the multifaceted role of language in MNCs. A particularly active sub-stream within this emerging area is concerned with the impact of language barriers on multinational teams (MNTs). Given that teamwork “has become the contemporary ‘modus operandi’” in MNCs and considering that MNTs depend on the interaction between members speaking different mother tongues, the effective management of language barriers in these contexts is very important. The task of bridging lin- guistic boundaries in MNTs is mostly assigned to MNT leaders, but there is a paucity of specific guidelines on how they can address the challenges of language barriers.
The negative emotions language barriers can trigger among MNT members present a particularly acute leadership challenge. Re- cent studies indicated that language-induced emotions can erode collaborative efforts and lead to losses in productivity and perfor- mance of MNTs or even on the MNC level. Whereas management studies have only recently taken a “linguistic turn”, the “affective revolution” in
organizational behavior research, which turned scholars' attention to the impact of employees' emotions on organizational outcomes, already started in the late 1990s. Ever since, the investigation of emotions has taken center stage in organizational behavior. Positive emotions are seen as “the wellspring of human motivation”, but recent studies particularly highlighted the disruptive potential of negative emotions and the need to understand and control them. Con- sequently, the management of employees' emotions emerged as an important component of effective leadership.
The pioneering studies on the emotional outcomes of language barriers mainly focused on analyzing the problem of language- induced emotions in multinational work environments, but did not provide a detailed account of possible solutions. Consequently, we still know very little about how MNT leaders can manage emotions triggered by language barriers. To address this gap, we con- ducted an inductive study investigating successful leadership measures to mitigate language-induced negative emotions in MNCs.