The three articles provide substantial knowledge for the nascent stream of multicultural and multilingual employees, a workforce that gains increasing importance. On the basis of my qualitative data collection and analysis, I developed comprehensive models that explain 1) the capabilities these individuals have and how they implement them when engaging as bridge individuals, helping others to overcome cultural and language barriers, 2) the components they internalize to their multicultural and multilingual schemas that they can draw on when working in multinational settings, and 3) how they form social capital and how the properties of their social capital outcome look like which they and organizations can use to access resources. As such, I provide the following theoretical contributions:
First, the three articles clearly show that cultural and language diversity within individuals and the resulting processes and outcomes are complex, nuanced and multifaceted.
In the second article, I provide a significantly deeper insight into the knowledge structures in multicultural and multilingual individuals’ minds and how they internalize these. In the first and third article, I show how they use a multitude of attributes and characteristics for their advantage in work contexts. By looking at the complex micro-processes that lead to outcomes such as the bridging of cultural and language barriers and social capital, research gains a much better idea of the mechanisms that enable the beneficial use of this workforce.
Second, all three papers also show the complex dynamics between culture and language in general, and multiculturalism and multilingualism on the individual level in particular. So far, a separate approach on culture on the one hand and language on the other hand has led to fragmented findings in the three areas of my papers and beyond. For example, through the study of language barriers without considering multiculturals’ roles in overcoming these, research was not able to detect their contributions. Further, the study of multiculturals’
cognitive schemas without considering the language elements prevented to substantiate the
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crucial role of language in internalizing cultural elements. In addition, it was only due to the integrated approach that I could differentiate between the language-specific only social capital stemming from multilingualism, but culture-specific and culture-general social capital that results from multiculturalism. My three papers clearly show the benefits of taking an integrated approach to study these closely related employee groups, because the cultural and language resources do overlap and influence each other.
Third, I offer ways to move beyond binary constructs and study multiculturalism and multilingualism as continua. Previously, individuals were categorized into the binary construct mono-cultural / -lingual and multi-cultural / -lingual. Research on multicultural individuals has started to adopt a perspective along continua by conceptualizing them along degrees in knowledge, internalization and identification. Research on multilingual individuals, in turn, has treated them as either native or non-native speakers, rarely allowing for a third option of professional speakers. In the three papers, I adopt, based on my findings, the perspective that they can have varying degrees of proficiency, also with regards to different contexts such as the professional and the private. By categorizing multiculturals and multilinguals along continua, my studies show that they take on the role as bridge individual even with lower levels of cultural or language skills, possess unique compositions of cultural and language elements in their cognitive schemas, and form deeper or less deep social capital.
Fourth, my study shows the importance of drawing from other disciplines such as linguistics and education, from the latter specifically from language learning and intercultural development. Scholars have previously highlighted that particularly IB research can learn from other disciplines to generate theory, and some have injected elements from linguistics into language research and psychology into multicultural research. My study confirms that linguistics is a rich discipline to learn from and introduces fields from education. As such, for example, my study shows that different stages in multilingualism, similarly to different stages
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in language learning, result in either asset- or shortcoming-based forms of bridging, as well as varying depth in social capital. Further, drawing from psychology and education research, I was able to show how multiculturals internalize knowledge, skills, values and norms as a multicultural schema in their minds.
Last but certainly not least, my qualitative, inductive, explorative study finally uncovered some of the many unknowns of multicultural and multilingual employees.
Qualitative methods are particularly well suited to study unknown topics. Since multicultural and multilingual individuals as employee groups are still young streams of research, I could advance theory through an in-depth exploration of these individuals. For example, through the inductive approach, I could reveal the unexpected finding that individuals not only draw on their cultural and / or language-related assets, but also shortcomings to bridge language barriers. With the in-depth semi-structured interviews, I could uncover the deeply internalized cultural and language elements in their cognitive schemas. Further, the approach allowed me to unravel the multifaceted process of forming social capital, which included new attributes that had not been detected before.
To conclude, my study advances research on employees that gain increasing importance in the business world, particularly in multinational contexts, namely, multicultural and multilingual individuals. I am confident that I could provide substantial new knowledge through the mid-range theories that I developed on the basis of my rich data set.
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