Positive Dissimilarity Attitudes in Multicultural Organizations : The Role of Language Diversity and Communication Frequency

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to contribute to the field of diversity studies with novel insights on how language diversity and communication frequency influence dissimilarity attitudes. Design/methodology/approach – The authors examine language diversity and communication frequency as group-level antecedents for positive dissimilarity attitudes by use of questionnaire responses from 489 members of academic culturally diverse departments. Findings – The results showed that communication frequency has strong positive relationships with three variables depicting positive dissimilarity attitudes, namely openness to linguistic, visible and informational diversity. Contradicting our predictions, language diversity had positive associations with all variables portraying positive dissimilarity attitudes. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail. Originality/value – Few prior studies have dealt with the relations between language, communication and dissimilarity attitudes