Multilingual organisations: employee motives and human resource management adaptive strategies

Organisational and demographic trends have pushed scholars and practitioners to find alternative approaches to managing increasingly multilingual workplace beyond the mandate of a single corporate language. Specifically, the current study uses a critical incident paradigm to explore employee motives underlying the desire to speak a non-mutually understood language at work. The results outline how these motives have both desirable and undesirable consequences for multilingual work environments. Drawing on these findings, a number of policies and procedures are presented that Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals can enact to foster harmonious workplace interactions in a linguistically diverse workplace and reduce linguistic ostracism perceptions.