Consequently, we found national culture to be of little relevance for the specific language-based challenges of MNT leaders. We nevertheless encourage future studies to explore in greater depth how the solutions to language-induced emotions play out in different cultural environments.
Third, we focused in particular on emotion management as performed by MNT leaders, since this emerged to be of particular rel- evance to our respondents. This focus implied, however, that we did not account for team members' self-management and, hence, their contribution to emotions at work. We acknowledge the validity of Stewart idea that entire teams actively engage in the regulation of team emotions and refer to Hinds recent study on global virtual team members coping with language-induced emotions.
Fourth, while our interviews did not allow us to capture intra-individual variation in emotions in real time, we argue that our critical incident-based interviewing technique is well suited to capture the dynamic nature of individual emotions. This technique focuses informants' attention on specific events, which triggered particularly intense emotional experiences. It is therefore in line with affective events theory, which posits that particular events are a chief source of emotions. Nevertheless, we encourage future research studying the intra-individual variation in language-induced emotions specifically with event-based design.
Fifth, we did not explicitly examine how language-induced negative emotions and the positive leadership outcomes of language- related emotion management influence team performance, as the relationships between negative emotions and performance and between leadership outcomes and performance have already been investigated to large extents. Moreover, since team performance is a multifaceted construct with context-specific indicators, we argue that general performance measures would not adequately capture the dynamics of MNT leadership. However, our study indicates the beneficial effect of language-related emotion management strategies on MNT performance by providing clear evidence for its positive effects both in terms of mitigating negative emotions and creating directly positive leadership outcomes. We encourage qualitative follow-up inves- tigations to examine these relationships in more depth and quantitative studies to test them statistically.
Conclusion
Recent pioneering work has indicated the problematic emotional impact of language barriers on MNT members, but has not ex- plained how MNT leaders can address this problem. Our study demonstrated that MNT leaders are capable of preventing negative emotions like anxiety and resentment in the first place and have effective strategies at their disposal to mitigate these disruptive emo- tions when they do occur. By redirecting team member's attention away from language-induced emotions and by helping them to reappraise linguistic diversity, MNT leaders foster team sensemaking, team climate, and subordinates' willingness to follow.
Our in-depth qualitative study encourages further research at the cross-roads of leadership, language and emotion research in MNTs. Additional qualitative research should investigate language-induced emotions and related leadership strategies in further in- dustries and home countries to discover similarities and differences across other substantive leadership contexts. Based on the rela- tionships these studies would uncover, scholars should then generate quantitatively testable hypotheses. Ultimately, these hypotheses should be tested in a representative sample across a range of cultural and linguistic contexts.
We thank Anne-Wil Harzing and Vasiliki Gargalianou for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.