The emotional benefits and performance costs of building a psychologically safe language climate in MNCs

How employees cope with the requirement to work in a foreign language has received little scholarly attention. To narrow this gap, we conducted an ethnographic study at KONE and NOKIA, companies using English as a lingua franca. Results indicate that employees who are non-native lingua franca speakers may cope collectively with the language demands by building a psychologically safe language climate. Although benefitting them emotionally,...