Language Diversity and Employees’ Interpersonal Organisational Behaviours: An Experimental Study

The rapid increase in international business has led to a large number of multinational corporations (MNCs) in China. Multinational corporations are usually multilingual. Different languages such as HQ language, the local language, and mixed languages are all used in Chinese organisational contexts which leads to many language diversity-related problems. Based on an experiment of 193 Chinese employees, this study explores how language diversity impacts employees’ shared linguistic identity and trust over another employee, which then affects their interpersonal organisational behaviours (e.g., hiring decision, cooperative behaviour and help-seeking behaviour) towards that employee. This study contributes to the international management literature by adding knowledge to the impacts of language diversity on employees’ interpersonal organisational behaviours. Through studying the mixed language, it also expands the scope of ‘language diversity’ in international business literature.