Boundary Spanning - How to Walk the Talk with a Foreign Accent?

Abstract

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – characterized by globally dispersed team members – are increasingly being employed to conduct projects in MNCs. Given the multilingual and multicultural nature of such teams, and the lack of physical interaction, language and communication play an important role in the smooth functioning of these teams. Previous research has highlighted the formation of subgroups and faultlines in multilingual teams. In our qualitative research, we study the understudied context of Latin America, specifically Mexico and find that similar faultlines exist in GVTs as well. In this study, we find that while multilingual managers who are proficient in the corporate language as well as the dominant language of the specific within-team linguistic subgroups could act as boundary spanners, the effectiveness of such role might be influenced by other factors, such as accent and the socio-economic status of their country of origin. Furthermore, linking our findings to previous studies we identify three different characteristics of multilingual boundary spanners and discuss the role of accents for each of them.