Linguistic Issues
Team conflict in global settings may also develop and be exacerbated by linguistic, interpretive, and semantic distances among participants from different countries. In the United States, for example, there have been a number of court cases that have addressed language issues in the workplace.
A recent case before the California courts addresses Filipino nurses’ right to speak Tagalog to one another during breaks and to patients who are from the Philippines (Chavez, 2010). The hospital had initiated a no-exception English Only policy in the workplace, and those members of the health team (doctors and nurses) who only spoke English were accused of continually stopping Filipino nurses from speaking to one another, thereby creating a hostile work climate.In all types of work groups, it is common for team members from a dominant group to report that they feel threatened, distrustful, and suspicious when other members speak to one another in a language other than the dominant one (Samovar, Porter, & McDaniel, 2009). Nonnative speakers of the dominant language, on the other hand, often perceive that their voices are not counted and they are not seen as adding sufficient value to the transnational team. And although virtual teams may mitigate these issues somewhat since traditional mediated communication sometimes reduces the extent to which team members’ cultures are salient in an interaction (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976), the relational dynamism of new social media may further increase the challenges to teams operating across national borders (Kanter, 2003).