Doctoral defense Vasiliki Gargalianou

Title
The role of language in business settings.

Promotor
Prof. dr. Arjen van Witteloostuijn, University of Antwerp

Date
16 September 2015

Abstract
In the current era of globalization, organizations often hire employees who come from different countries and speak in different mother tongues. To communicate, they need a common language. In fact, employees in their work-life come to collaborate, take decisions, make presentations and participate in meetings held in a foreign language instead of their own. Multinational companies today tend to adopt English as the corporate language in order to facilitate communications between employees and to communicate with their customer base. Using a foreign language is not an easy task for some non-native speakers owing to their worry of underperformance in that foreign language. One of the reasons is that for many non-native speakers, speaking a foreign language might not be as easy as speaking their native language. This research investigates the role of foreign language on cooperative behavior and perceptions about colleagues at the workplace while examines the role of personality and gender as factors linked with anxiety.