Linguistic diversity in cooperative work processes of task-oriented teams
Creators: name: Manchen Spörri, Sylvia
name: Hohenstein, Christiane
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2012
Subjects: Kooperation In Arbeitsprozessen
Sprachliche Diversität
Interkulturelle Teams
Lingua Franca
Cooperation In Work Processes
Intercultural Teams
Linguistic Diversity
400: Sprache und Linguistik

description: Due to the internationalisation of companies and the immigration into Switzerland, Swiss companies today employ people from different backgrounds and with different mother tongues on all hierarchy levels. Thus, multilingual teams are becoming more common. The lingua franca, or common working language in these teams is often English or German; for many team members these are foreign or second languages. So far, research has paid too little attention to the linguistic challenges multilingual teams face and to the strategies they employ to efficiently master their communicative tasks.

Even though several studies within organisational psychology and small group research look at the relationship between cultural diversity and group performance, they limit interculturality to values and ethnicity without or only implicitly taking into account language, thus neglecting its impact. On the other hand, communication in teams is being researched linguistically, but not from the angle of communicative efficiency and teamwork optimisation. Consequently, language diversity and strategies of coping with language diversity in team communication are mostly absent in psychological research and communicative efficiency is only a minor subject in organisational psychology.

The main goal is to analyse how communicative efficiency in multilingual company-internal teams is attained. Our research question is whether communicative efficiency depends on the team’s ability to manage its diversity of languages, i.e. to master specific linguistic and communicative challenges in the company appropriately.

Since the project is at the intersection of linguistic communication and team performance in organisations, it calls for an approach that combines linguistic methods with methods of organisational psychology and that is based on action theory and functional-pragmatic communication analysis as a common framework, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The data from two partner companies serve as case studies which are compared in a contrastive design.

The findings of the study will help our partners in practice to foster multilingual teams and to establish a best-practice model that may be adapted for the use with other teams. This contrastive design with two partners in practice each having their own specific linguistically diverse work groups, enables an exemplary approach to linguistically diverse work groups, which are most common in this form in a large number of Swiss companies. As contrastive case studies they therefore help to gain new insights into the research area.
description: Sowohl durch die zunehmende Internationalisierung als auch durch Migrationsbewegungen in die Schweiz arbeiten Teams in Unternehmen auf allen hierarchischen Stufen vermehrt in sprachdiversen Konstellationen. Oftmals werden Deutsch oder Englisch als lingua franca zur Verständigung verwendet.
In dem vorliegenden Projekt wird untersucht, welche kommunikativen Probleme sich durch die Sprachdiversität von Teams ergeben und welche Bewältigungsstrategien diese entwickeln, um die kommunikative Effizienz in Teamsitzungen sicherzustellen. Diese Fragestellungen werden sowohl aus linguistischer Perspektive als auch aus organisationspsychologischer Sicht bearbeitet. In zwei betrieblichen Fallstudien werden in einem transdisziplinären Design Teamsitzungen mit funktional-pragmatischen Methoden analysiert und mit organisationalen Rahmenbedingungen sowie individuellen Bewältigungsstrategien in Beziehung gesetzt.
Erste Ergebnisse zeigen, dass in Abhängigkeit von der individuellen Erfahrung in der Zusammenarbeit in sprachdiversen Teams, von der Teamkonstellation und in Abhängigkeit von der Sprachpolitik des Unternehmens Mitarbeitende Kommunikationsstrategien entwickeln, welche zum einen zur kommunikativen Effizienz beitragen. Dazu gehören z.B. das Aushelfen mit Vokabeln, mehrmaliges Erklären oder fehlertolerantes Verhalten. Zum anderen verursachen sie aber auch dysfunktionale Effekte wie unsachgemässe Vereinfachungen, ungenaue Auftragsvergabe durch Moderator/innen und fehlende Partizipation der Mitarbeitenden an Sitzungen und Entscheidungen. Durch den transdisziplinären Ansatz können komplexe Zusammenhänge und positive und negative Effekte der kommunikativen Strategien aufgezeigt werden. Funktionierende Strategien sollen den Praxispartnern und weiteren Betrieben als Best-Practice Modelle dienen.
description: Due to the internationalisation of companies and the immigration into Switzerland, Swiss companies today employ people from different backgrounds and with different mother tongues on all hierarchy levels. Thus, multilingual teams are becoming more common. The lingua franca, or common working language in these teams is often English or German; for many team members these are foreign or second languages. So far, research has paid too little attention to the linguistic challenges multilingual teams face and to the strategies they employ to efficiently master their communicative tasks.
Even though several studies within organisational psychology and small group research look at the relationship between cultural diversity and group performance, they limit interculturality to values and ethnicity without or only implicitly taking into account language, thus neglecting its impact. On the other hand, communication in teams is being researched linguistically, but not from the angle of communicative efficiency and teamwork optimisation. Consequently, language diversity and strategies of coping with language diversity in team communication are mostly absent in psychological research and communicative efficiency is only a minor subject in organisational psychology.
The main goal is to analyse how communicative efficiency in multilingual company-internal teams is attained. Our research question is whether communicative efficiency depends on the team’s ability to manage its diversity of languages, i.e. to master specific linguistic and communicative challenges in the company appropriately.
Since the project is at the intersection of linguistic communication and team performance in organisations, it calls for an approach that combines linguistic methods with methods of organisational psychology and that is based on action theory and functional-pragmatic communication analysis as a common framework, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. The data from two partner companies serve as case studies which are compared in a contrastive design.
The findings of the study will help our partners in practice to foster multilingual teams and to establish a best-practice model that may be adapted for the use with other teams. This contrastive design with two partners in practice each having their own specific linguistically diverse work groups, enables an exemplary approach to linguistically diverse work groups, which are most common in this form in a large number of Swiss companies. As contrastive case studies they therefore help to gain new insights into the research area.