Lingua Franca, Communication and Knowledge Transfer in MNEs

The environment of multinational corporation (MNC) is a multilingual community. Although virtual team members use a lingua franca (a shared language) to communicate in a multilingual community, the challenge of language capability would cause communication barriers, which may lead to conflict and hinder the process of knowledge transfer. Meanwhile, when MNC/virtual team members communicate and/or transfer knowledge, the complexity of cultural diversity and language foreignness challenges them. This paper applies media richness theory on the use of language. The findings in this paper point out that a common language does not guarantee successful communication. This paper focuses on the factor of language and reviews how the use of language would influence the effectiveness of communication for successful knowledge transfer