The standards way of thinking about diversity has it that ethnic, gender, and race are the predominant merits companies need to associate at the workplace. Where they often fall short of, however, is in fully realizing the effect language diversity plays in conversation. From the “Journal of Applied Behavioral Science,” researchers Regina Kim, Loriann Roberson, Marcello Russo, and Paolo Briganti stress why global leaders and managers should embrace multilinguist communication more in our increasingly globalized workplace. Their article “Language Diversity, Non-native Accents, and Their Consequences at the Workplace” contends that varying levels of a speakers fluency and the perceived difficulty of an employees’ competence, regardless of their actual competence, creates subtle forms of discriminations, the underevaluation of foreign employees, and fewer opportunities for careers.
Since language and communication ultimately pervade every facet of organization life, challenges between different linguistic backgrounds are inevitable. As a response the authors extend recommendations and intervention strategies based on conducted interviews and surveys. Their research illuminates lesser-known areas of language diversity approaching the actual experiences of nonnative speakers rather than how prior research merely evaluated subjects in the past. In doing so they make clear why organizations should reconcile these issues prior in order to create a more productive and inclusive work environment.
Good work, Bryan, though we could use a bit more definition of the source–what kind of study are the authors conducting here? is this based on workplace interviews/data collection? on a review of other published studies? How are they building this case?
And please be explicit about their main argument–from what I gather they’re talking less about the impacts of linguistic diversity and more about the impacts on multilingual employees who are undervalued? Is that correct? Try to be as direct as possible in setting forth their main take-away.
Journal title should be in italics to differentiate it from the article title in quotation marks.