Contemporary Business Communication and One Language Policy in Busines Essay

Contemporary Business Communication and One Language Policy in Business - Essay Example In this article, Neeley highlights the benefits of adopting a language with a global appeal like English as the official mode of communication for multinationals with cross-border operations. By using different languages depending on the country of operation, multinationals like Samsung would adopt English in the united states and the united kingdom, Spanish in Spain and the southern American and Caribbean states, French in France and its former colonies in Africa and Latin America among other languages. This leads to complication and lack of uniform operation and mode of communicating important policy issues from the head office which uses Korean as the official language (Fredriksson, Barner & Piekkari, 2006). Multilingualism may be viewed as an approach to eliminating the challenges of communication barriers facing multinationals but its application in the entire organization affects the communication process and creates confusion. This lays the ground for policy misinterpretation and lack of effective unit management and coherence with the head office. In this paper, the sentiments of Neeley (2012) will be discussed in relation to the current use of English in multinationals operating in predominantly non-English countries. According to Neeley (2012), the adoption of a common communication mode is more than just being a good idea for organizations with domestic operations in the United States with international target market or companies in France intending to tap on the domestic market. The use of different languages in an organization affects the operation of the multinationals and constitutes to the inefficient management approaches. Organizations today exist as interactive places where communication is key to the success of the approaches adopted. Managers and supervisors of  multinationals coordinate the task of employees based in different countries whose language may not be common to the supervisors. A number of factors have been attributed to the current emergence of English as a common communication language in multinationals across the globe (Bell, 2011).