leaders who spoke the working language as their mother tongue frequently recommended using humor, whereas non-native speakers took a more skeptical position towards this technique. Clearly, MNT leaders should not rely on sophisticated puns, which may exacerbate the feeling of exclusion among less proficient speakers of the working language. Instead, they may target language differences as a source of humor in itself:
I always joke about the fact that my level of German skills is similar to what you would hear from a kindergartener. So when you drop the conversation down to kindergarten level, that helps lighten the mood sometimes in a very difficult conversation.
Given that laughter creates a feeling of sociability and links people together, humor may be a means to avoid a quarrel, solve a con- flict, play down disagreement or help to overcome awkward situations. Following the principles of emotional contagion, an MNT leader who frequently uses humor to lighten the mood can effectively spread positive emotions. Yet, in some cultures the use of too much humor at the workplace carries also the risk for the MNT leader of appearing an unserious person. Confining the use of humor to after-hours occasions can help to lighten the emotional burden while at the same time preserving the MNT leader's authority and professionalism.
Highlighting the similarities of individual team members and their common goals emerged as a second frequently mentioned technique to redirect MNT members' attention in a positive way. MNT leaders may bring their subordinates closer together and dis- perse language-induced resentment by stressing similarities on the individual level:
You need to highlight similarities and teach your staff that regardless of your language, your culture, at the end of the day we are all basically coming from the same background. Put your kids in a good school, put food on your table, save for your retire- ment — no matter where someone comes from, which culture or mother tongue, everyone has the same goals.
More important than highlighting individual commonalities, however, is an emphasis on a common professional objective. If the members of a multilingual work group focus on their individual similarities and on common professional goals, language differences retreat into the background:
We have a common goal that we want to achieve. That is what brings us together. Team members are not interested in lan- guage barriers as long as they focus on their common objective.
These team-specific findings coincide with previous studies from the larger literature on global leadership. Huy (1999), for in- stance, believes that successful leadership requires inspiring followers with a captivating vision of shared goals. Bird et al. (2010) even define global leadership as the process of motivating different groups to work together synergistically towards a common vision and common goal. If MNC employees focus on this common ground, interaction can be facilitated and negative emotions reduced.
The interview excerpts reproduced in Table 5 further illustrate the measures MNT leaders can use to redirect subordinates' atten- tion away from language barriers. By using humor to make subordinates forget the language-induced emotional burden or by focusing team members' attention on the team's common goals, MNT leaders “distract attention away from the emotion-provoking situation”. If we compare our findings with the established typology of emotion management strategies, we find interesting parallels. Hence, our findings constitute a specification for multilingual settings of the general strategy of altering attention by distracting