Helene Tenzer

Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich | LMU

Based on 90 semi-structured interviews in 15 multinational teams (MNTs), this study shows which negative emotions language barriers can provoke among MNT members and investigates how MNT leaders can successfully mitigate these detrimental effects. Multilingual teams constitute a leadership context of paramount importance in today’s organizations, w...

Large corporations increasingly use multinational teams to integrate their global operations. To perform this complex task efficiently, team members need to develop shared mental models (SMMs), i.e. an organized understanding of the knowledge base they are sharing. In multinational teams, the heterogeneity of team members makes SMM formation especi...

This study systematically investigates how language barriers influence trust formation in multinational teams (MNTs). On the basis of 90 interviews with team members, team leaders and senior managers in 15 MNTs in 3 German automotive corporations, the authors show how MNT members’ cognitive and emotional reactions to language barriers influence the...

This study investigates what attracts career‐oriented women to foreign subsidiaries and how they experience this work context. Based on 125 interviews with career‐oriented women in Japan, we find that their frequent choice of foreign employers is not only motivated by professional aspirations but also by identity‐related aspirations. Japanese women...

The current research conceptualizes workplace meetings as socially embedded forms of organizing and proposes that cross-cultural comparisons of workplace meetings offer insights into differences in meeting structures and processes. This provides a deeper understanding of how meetings drive organizing in different cultural settings. Specifically, we...

This qualitative study investigates how language diversity in multinational teams affects communication, which, in turn, influences knowledge processing. We show that evident language barriers (lack of lexical and syntactical proficiency) reduce participation in team communication, which impedes both basic and sophisticated knowledge processing act...

Innovation-oriented firms encourage their staff to generate ideas, but lack the resources to sponsor them all. Entrepreneurially minded employees may respond to this discrepancy with creative deviance, i.e. pursue ideas despite managerial orders to stop. We elucidate this understudied flipside of corporate entrepreneurship by theorizing and testing...

Communication between headquarters (HQs) and foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations (MNCs) is crucial for coordination, control, and knowledge transfer, but language barriers and geographic distance impede this exchange. Hypothesizing that MNCs react to these hurdles by appointing subsidiary top managers with adequate communication skil...

Following the globalization of higher management education and the view of academics as autonomous professionals, academic careers in business schools are deemed to typify the boundaryless careers of the 21 st century. We scrutinize the validity of this assumption, focusing on the language barriers internationally mobile management scholars are fac...

Creative deviance, i.e. the violation of a managerial order to stop working on a new idea, is an emerging topic in innovation research. Whereas the outcomes of this nonconforming behavior are inherently ambiguous, its importance for corporations' innovative capability is undisputed. We complement prior research on the organizational-level determina...

International business activities are always accompanied by language-related barriers as companies are confronted with multiple local languages and a multinational workforce. To increase the efficiency of corporate communication, documentation and cross-national teamwork, an increasing number of companies have implemented common language policies i...

A fast growing number of studies demonstrates that language diversity influences almost all management decisions in modern multinational corporations. Whereas no doubt remains about the practical importance of language, the empirical investigation and theoretical conceptualization of its complex and multifaceted effects still presents a substantial...

The contributions to this Special Issue have all been presented at the 10th International GEM&L (Groupe d’Études Management et Langage) Conference in Paris in March 2016. Collectively, these articles provide new conceptual and empirical perspectives on globalised work across language boundaries.

Despite the strong economic growth of many African countries, foreign investors often overlook their potential. Nation branding can raise their awareness for those countries' particular strengths. To indicate which specific image attributes nation branding campaigns may prioritize, 144 managers evaluated the importance of 22 market selection criter...

Based on 90 interviews with leaders and members of 15 multinational teams, this study explores the influence of language differences on power dynamics in multinational teams. First, we establish hierarchical position and professional expertise as general sources of power in teamwork. Subsequently, we demonstrate how different language policies, the...

This study investigates the impact of language barriers on multilingual virtual teams members’ choice between different communication media in their inner-team interactions. Through interviewing team leaders and members in both mono- and multilingual virtual teams, we discover discrepancies in media choice and media performance between these two se...

This paper discusses how the private sector, and here specifically African-European partnerships between entrepreneurs, can assist to attain the development goals formulated by the United Nations’ Post-2015 Agenda for Sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on meetings between African and European entrepreneurs convened on the initiative of H. E. Prof. Dr. Hor...

Our contribution seeks to (1) outline how cross-cultural management and, more recently, language studies developed as two interrelated subareas within international business research; (2) discuss the changing paradigms and orthodoxies under which empirical research in cross-cultural management and language studies has been executed, focusing in par...

This panel symposium will address the current state of the field of cross-cultural management (CCM) and its contributions to international business, management and organizations. Presenters will explore and discuss future avenues promising to take for the field of CCM to be of value to people and organizations who have to navigate in a global and i...

This study investigates the impact of language barriers on the selection of communication media in the work process of global virtual teams (GVTs). Based on semi-structured interviews with 30 leaders and members of six GVTs in three automotive and three IT multinationals we show that many team members are cognitively overwhelmed by synchronous virt...

This study explores the impact of language diversity, specifically of unequal language proficiency, on power relations in multinational teams (MNTs). Based on qualitative investigations of 15 MNTs in three German multinational corporations (MNCs) we show that the degree of disparity in MNT members’ proficiency in their team’s working language and t...

Dieser Artikel zeigt einige Ergebnisse der Konferenz »Chance: Africa Europe Entrepreneurs’ Dialogue« auf, die im Juni vergangenen Jahres in Accra abgehalten wurde. Bei dieser Tagung diskutierten Unternehmer aus Europa und Afrika, wie Firmenpartnerschaften wirtschaftlich erfolgreich sein und gleichzeitig die Entwicklung in den afrikanischen Staaten...

This study is the first to link the investigation of language barriers in international business with the study of emotions in organizations and global leadership research. Based on semi-structured interviews with 8 senior managers, 15 team leaders and 67 of their subordinates in three multinational corporations, we show how language-induced anxiet...

This study examines the degree to which Japanese, German and US multinational corporations (MNCs) use two different subsidiary control mechanisms: direct control through headquarters and indirect control through staffing key positions in subsidiary management with expatriates. On the basis of data from 617 subsidiaries, we found that US MNCs focus...

This paper investigates the importance of two distinctly different sources of conflicts in foreign subsidiaries of MNCs: sources of conflicts that are culture- and institutionally induced. Our comprehensive investigation of 617 foreign subsidiaries of US, Japanese and German multinationals firstly demonstrates that subsidiary managers attribute inn...

This article investigates the degree of conflict between different groups of employees in MNC subsidiaries in relation to different home-host country combinations. More specifically, we compared the degree of conflict of Western subsidiaries in Japan and Japanese subsidiaries in the West. We based our comprehensive investigation on data from 617 US...