Journal of World Business 56 (2021) 101184 Available online 21 December 2020 1090-9516/© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. The impact of language barriers on knowledge processing in multinational teams Helene Tenzer a, *, Markus Pudelko a , Mary Zellmer-Bruhn b a Department of International Business, Tübingen University, Melanchthonstraße 30, 72074 Tübingen, Germany b Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, 321 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Language Communication Knowledge processing Multinational teams Qualitative research ABSTRACT This qualitative study investigates how language diversity in multinational teams affects communication, which, in turn, infuences knowledge processing. We show that evident language barriers (lack of lexical and syntactical profciency) reduce participation in team communication, which impedes both basic and sophisticated knowl- edge processing activities. We also demonstrate that hidden language barriers (pragmatic and prosodic transfer between mother tongues and working language) impair sensemaking in the team, which disrupts sophisticated knowledge processing activities. By highlighting the relevance of hidden barriers, our study encourages a more comprehensive conceptualization of language barriers and uncovers the micro-foundations of knowledge pro- cessing in multilingual teams. Contrasting evident and hidden barriers, our study juxtaposes the instrumental and the cultural perspective on language. By distinguishing basic and sophisticated knowledge processing activities, we weigh the information processing against the socio-cognitive perspective on knowledge. We integrate these divergent perspectives on language and knowledge processing both within and across the respective research felds. 1. Introduction To keep up with changing economic conditions and global compe- tition (Marrone, 2010), multinational corporations (MNCs) utilize team-based approaches (Neck, Bligh, Pearce, & Kohles, 2006). Multi- national teams (MNTs) are paramount for global collaboration, partic- ularly for knowledge processing within MNC units (Backmann, Kanitz, Tian, Hoffmann, & Hoegl, 2020). As teams are defned by the interde- pendency between their members (Harris & Sherblom, 2018), they rely on intense communication to align their members’ contributions. This communication is highly vulnerable to language barriers, since MNTs not only include members of different national and cultural backgrounds (Earley & Gibson, 2002), but typically also unite speakers of different mother tongues (Tenzer, Pudelko, & Harzing, 2014). MNTs’ knowledge processing is both particularly decisive for their goal fulflment and particularly vulnerable to language barriers. Global corporations explicitly form MNTs to locate, store, allocate, and retrieve diverse knowledge (Haas & Cummings, 2015), to solve complex tasks or to take high-level decisions (Dahlin, Weingart, & Hinds, 2005). Communication is essential for knowledge processing activities like learning about what others know, bringing new knowledge into employees’ shared repository, and retrieving knowledge from the group (Kotlarsky, van den Hooff, & Houtman, 2015). Language as the vehicle of communication is therefore indispensable for these processes (Reiche, Harzing, & Pudelko, 2015; Wang, Clegg, Gajewska-De Mattos, & Buck- ley, 2018; Welch & Welch, 2008). Although knowledge researchers (Ahmad, 2018; Ahmad & Wid´ en, 2015) and international business (IB) scholars (Ahmad & Barner-Rasmussen, 2019; Peltokorpi & Vaara, 2014) agree on the disruptive potential of language barriers for knowledge processing in MNTs, their relationship has not been studied in suffcient depth. To date, IB language research has mostly been concerned with language profciency problems, assuming that barriers can be removed by increasing MNT members’ fuency in their team’s working language (Peltokorpi & Vaara, 2014). Countering this general position, some IB studies assert that communication is bound by the socio-cognitive con- texts of conversation partners (K¨ onig, Fehn, Puck, & Graf-Vlachy, 2017) and that culture infuences how language is used (Chen, Geluykens, & Choi, 2006; Kassis Henderson, 2005; Wang et al., 2018), suggesting that the infuence of language on MNT knowledge processing may be more complex. However, this relationship has not been explored in detail and a comprehensive perspective on language effects is still missing. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: helene.tenzer@uni-tuebingen.de (H. Tenzer), markus.pudelko@uni-tuebingen.de (M. Pudelko), zellm002@umn.edu (M. Zellmer-Bruhn). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of World Business journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jwb https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jwb.2020.101184 Received 12 June 2020; Received in revised form 1 December 2020; Accepted 7 December 2020