Rebecca M.

Hernandez
Language Barriers, leadership and companies

How Language Barriers Affect Leadership, Employees and Companies

Rebecca M. Hernandez
South Texas College

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

Abstract
Language barriers in the workplace can trigger difficulties in being an effective leader. As a
leader, being unable to communicate with your employees can be detrimental to the companys
growth and to the overall image of the company. If employees are unable to understand their
leaders because of language barriers the business as a whole suffers. Negative effects that
language barriers can have on a business start at safety, overall mental health of everyone
involved, losses in revenue due to misunderstandings and impede the business from potential
future growth.
Keywords: Leaders, employees, companies

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

How Language Barriers Affect Leadership, Employees and Companies

Leading in a workplace and working with people who all speak the same language can be
quite challenging. Everybody has their own personality traits that make them unique and thus
bring diversity to the workplace. Now, imagine trying to be an effective leader while leading a
group where one of your major challenges is a language barrier. Imagine that your employees
speak a different language other than your primary language and you are responsible for making
sure that all aspects of the job are done efficiently and most importantly correctly. This can pose
a major challenge and can impact the business in many ways. This can make it difficult to
achieve success as a company and your employees may never have a sense of belonging, which
is also damaging for the company as a whole.
Making language learning more accessible
In many instances, companies hire people from other places to come and lead their
businesses or other times, employees are hired from somewhere else to come and work. In these
cases, people leave their native towns and come to brand new place to come and work. Imagine
moving somewhere to start a new job and being an immediate outsider for not knowing the
language. For people being hired into a leadership role, this can be a recipe for failure. For
starters, language barriers normally hinder our ability to build new relationships. People around
you could be carrying on a conversation or even joking around and you would not understand.
When stepping into a new place there is also paperwork that needs to be filled out and important
documents such as IRS forms and insurance forms. If you do not know the language you can see
where this would present a challenge. Leadership roles often require that you communicate
directly with corporate offices or even government agencies to report findings, as part of your

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

job description. Having to send out an email to a government agency when you do not
understand the language yourself can pose a great threat to the company. What if the message
you are relaying is not the proper message? Many companies have discovered that language
barriers are a problem and have looked for ways to become more efficient and make language
learning more available for employees. This is the kind of problem that the team at a unimodal
distance education institution set out to solve when they designed the English as a Second
Language mobile learning project, a pilot project using mobile devices as the ESL training
delivery mode to non-native English speakers who required grammar skills to improve their
English. (Jalovcic, D.) Leadership strategies in mobile English as a Second Language training.
While workers were not taken off site and given the opportunity for in class work, workers were
provided with handheld (mobile) device that could aid them in working on their language and
translations. This suggestive use of mobile learning is an excellent idea as an added effort to try
and solve the problems of language barriers but you also have to know that it is not just as simple
as putting a device in someones hand that is going to make them learning the language you need
them to learn. The workers/leader must be willing to put in the time and effort as well to take
advantage of the tool at hand.

Communication Quality Satisfaction 1

Communication and language barriers between leaders and employees, also has a great
impact on communication quality satisfaction. The communication quality satisfaction affects
both the leader, the employee and the business as a whole. It is by communicating that
employees learn to do their jobs. They are trained by communicating to them their job
responsibilities and expectations. In most cases, the leader is in charge of training the employee

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

and by advising the employee what their expectations are, and this is normally done in the native
tongue. Coaching and developing your employee (after they have been on the job) is also a
means of communication, (normally done in the native tongue), that determines how well they
will do their job. Leading an employee to understand organization ethics is also another form of
communication. The extent to which you are able to relay the information and the employee is
able to understand and carryout the processes of your teachings, will determine whether or not
you all have had communication quality satisfaction. If you are ineffective in communicating the
information due to language barriers you are likely to have unfavorable results. The
communication satisfaction is equally important to both parties involved, both the leader and the
employee. It relays the general feelings that the employee will have to the overall organization
and ultimately determines whether or not the employee will be loyal to the company. A happy
employee will take pride in the place that he or she works and will most likely remain loyal. In
instances where there is lack of communication due language barriers, employees normally feel
left out and tend to resent the leader. Emotions are hard enough to express, interpret and process
in a native tongue (English in our case) and trying to express how you are feeling is even harder
when you speak a different language. (Tenzer, H.) Leading across language barriers: Managing
language-induced emotions in multinational teams. If a leader is not able to communicate
effectively with an employee, the work place becomes ambiguous and creates a whole reel of
emotions. Employees can start to feel stressed out if they do not understand what their role is.
After feeling stress, a sense of embarrassment can be felt if you are constantly doing something
incorrectly. This could be a result of the language barrier and not understanding your part in the
company and also by having misunderstood the information that you might have received from a
co-worker who translates the information to you. It is possible that the information does not relay

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

properly and you are given the wrong message. (M. Madera, J.) Managing language barriers in
the workplace: The roles of job demands and resources on turnover intentions. .All of these
feelings will eventually cause an employee to be absent to work on occasions and ultimately can
lead to them quitting. Having employees quit due to language barriers also affects the company
because of the cost associated with the time and resources that are put to use in an effort to hire
new staff. The cost with replacing new leaders, management particularly can also be pretty
costly. M. Madera, J. (2014, September 1). Managing language barriers in the workplace: The
roles of job demands and resources on turnover intentions.
Safety
Aside from affecting the quality satisfaction of the job, language barriers often lead to
accidents in the workplace, particularly when managing culturally diverse employees. For
example, research shows that immigrant workers are more likely to be involved in workplace
injuries than native workers, because they lack the language skills to read and understand safety
rules. M. Madera, J.). The effect of knowing a second language and experience working with
non-English speakers on job performance. Immigrant workers are also less likely to report a
workplace injury due to their limited English skills. M. Madera, J. . The effect of knowing a
second language and experience working with non-English speakers on job performance.
Leaders not being able to help employees, or in this case immigrant workers, understand the
risks that are associated with their job is very dangerous. Employees can put themselves in harms
way unintentionally due to not having the necessary skills to read through manuals or safety
hazard signs. Another good example of safety and not being able to read caution labels would be
like visiting a foreign place, China for example, and getting sick there and ending up in the
hospital. The leaders in the hospitals there are all of the doctors and nurses who will be caring for

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you but what if none of them spoke English? How would you relay the fact that you are allergic
to penicillin? What if they prescription they handed back to you was in all Chinese letters and
you knew nothing about it. You would not know what you were taking, how often to take it or if
the prescription consisted of penicillin. The leaders in this workplace did not have any way of
communicating with you but rather they handed you over something that they are certain you
need to survive.

Lets talk International

So far, we have discussed how language barriers can affect the leader and its employees
in areas such as safety and the quality of work. We have also talked about some companies who
have attempted adopting hand held devices to minimize language barriers in their workplace.
What we havent explored is how language barriers can affect a company wanting to go internal
or global. Most companies these days are looking to expand their company as far out as possible
and are always looking for new business opportunities. Many times, seeking these opportunities
means having meeting with leaders from your own company; and conferences or telephone
conversations with the leaders of other companies or even countries. In this position, a leader is
expected to present his case to the board and convince the other side why it is beneficial and
what the company or country will gain by allowing services or products from your company to
be offered in their place. Language barriers hinder the ability to express yourself creatively and
can damage the possibility of creating international partners. Collaboration is necessary in order
to make these kinds of international deals and you as the leader of the company are responsible
for making these connections. The language barrier makes communication less extensive and

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

impedes collaborators from exchanging and accumulating information. Hwang, K. Effects of the
Language Barrier on Processes and Performance of International Scientific Collaboration,
Collaborators Participation, Organizational Integrity, and Interorganizational Relationships. .
Not being able to make these deals internationally or even globally can inhibit the vision of the
company as a whole. Ultimately this set back can also affect you and your job stability at the
organization. If the organization hired you to lead and part of leading was setting up acquiring
this business and you are unable to do so due to language barriers, the company may consider
hiring the next person who has better qualifications and is able to relay messages without any
language barriers.

Consider Developing a Standard Corporate Language

Many multinational corporations have contemplated instilling a standard corporate
language to reduce language barriers. Creating a standard corporate language is a good idea for
companies to have unity in the work place and create a sense of belonging and understanding.
However, the standard corporate language, I would imagine, would be a language that would be
designed and tailored to that specific corporation and line of work. Then truly, you are not
creating a standard corporate language. You would be creating a language that would benefit
your business practices but when and if the leader or employee leaves that company they are
stuck back in square one. I can also see pros to creating the standard corporate language. Having
a standard corporate language would help individuals feel like they belong and they are a part of
something bigger than just themselves. It allows them to feel a sense of identity with the
company. It could be a code of language that can help connect people and strengthen the bonds

Language Barriers, leadership and companies

that people have. Leaders and employees would be able to communicate better and relay creative
ideas more freely and constantly and that capability could enhance the growth of the business
tremendously. Many multinational corporations can choose to instill a common language
throughout the organization on the foundation that it facilitates faster communication flows
within the organization, in terms of formal and informal reporting mechanisms within individual
units and between organizational units. A common language also fosters a sense of identity and
helps shape corporate image, gives organizational members a sense of belonging and avoids the
hassles associated with operating in multiple languages. Zander, L. Standardization and
contextualization: A study of language and leadership across 17 countries.
Leading a company and the employees in the company is extremely difficult; add a
language barrier and things become even more complicated. Leaders can essentially be
ineffective in their job if they are unable to communicate effectively with the employees they
oversee. So many concerns are put at stake in a business with language barriers. Everything from
the growth of the company to safety of the employees and overall mental state of everyone
involved can be stressful and detrimental. Many companies do their best to try and establish their
own way or system to improve these conditions and lighten the burden but ultimately there is no
right way of doing things. Leadership in this type of environment is certainly challenging and I
do not believe there is a right way to fix things. I think it is a matter of adapting and overcoming
the hurdles as you come across them. The only way that I could think to solve this problem
would be to have everybody be fluent in all languages (which is highly unlikely). As a leader,
part of your position is to never stop exploring and continue to look for creative way to succeed
in challenging areas, so this is the only way I can see someone overcoming this hurdle.

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References

1. Hwang, K. (2013). Effects of the Language Barrier on Processes and Performance of

International Scientific Collaboration, Collaborators Participation, Organizational
Integrity, and Interorganizational Relationships. Retrieved October 2, 2015.

2. Jalovcic, D. (2014, July 1). Leadership strategies in mobile English as a Second

Language training. Retrieved October 2, 2015.
3. M. Madera, J. (2014, September 1). Managing language barriers in the workplace: The
roles of job demands and resources on turnover intentions. Retrieved October 2, 2015.
4. M. Madera, J. (2012, December 1). The effect of knowing a second language and
experience working with non-English speakers on job performance. Retrieved October 2,
2015.
5. Tenzer, H. (2015, August 1). Leading across language barriers: Managing languageinduced emotions in multinational teams. Retrieved October 2, 2015.
6. Zander, L. (2011, July 1). Standardization and contextualization: A study of language and
leadership across 17 countries. Retrieved October 2, 2015.

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