Non-native accents and stigma: How self-fulfilling prophesies can affect career outcomes

Accent Attitudes: A Review Through Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive Perspectives

Interacting with speakers of different accents is a prevalent global phenomenon. Given the considerable influence of accents in daily life, it is important to conduct a comprehensive review of listeners' accent attitudes. This paper provides an integrative summary of research on accent attitudes, drawing from the Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive (ABC) perspectives. We begin by outlining the social meaning of accents and laying out the theoretical foundations of the ABC approach. Then, we organize and integrate existing research findings using the ABC framework. Next, we illustrate how the perspectives intersect by discussing pertinent research findings. Drawing from various sociocultural contexts over many years, this review underscores the significant impact of accents on people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The review concludes by discussing limitations, proposing future directions, highlighting real-world relevance, and suggesting areas for research expansion.

Accent Speaks Louder than Ability: Elucidating the Effect of Nonnative Accent on Trust

Nonnative accent often leads to prejudicial judgments. In this paper, we examine the effect of a job candidate’s Mandarin Chinese accent on a hiring manager’s perceptions of trust and the three dimensions of trustworthiness. The results of an online experiment with 179 working adults suggest that speaking with a nonnative accent (vs. no accent) adversely affects hiring decision-makers’ perceptions of trust and the ability dimension of trustworthiness, but not the benevolence and integrity dimensions. We also examined the effects of perspective taking (vs. no perspective taking) on trust and trustworthiness to test its beneficial role in interpersonal evaluations. The findings suggest that perspective taking may significantly mitigate the effect of language-based stigma on people’s judgments, providing evidence-based insights for organizational leaders and HR professionals.

Does International Status Affect Competence Ratings in Newly Formed Multinational Teams? The Role of Psychological Safety Growth and Verbal Behavior

National status has been found to influence how people are perceived in multinational teams. Team members from an international background are often perceived as less competent than those from the local context. Studies mainly focus on language differences to explain this phenomenon, but in this study, we offer a different theoretical explanation. We propose that national status can affect psychological safety and its development within teams, which in turn affects verbal behavior and competence ratings. To test this notion, we examine differences in psychological safety growth, verbal behavior and competence ratings among home country nationals based in the United Kingdom (UK) and international members of newly formed multinational teams. In a sample of 519 team members (101 teams), results showed that internationals, compared to home country nationals, have lower initial psychological safety, as well as slower development in psychological safety over time. Furthermore, the relationship between national status and competence ratings was partially mediated by psychological safety growth and verbal behavior. These results were fully replicated on a separate sample of 538 team members (90 teams) in a second study using an identical research design. However, exploratory analyses indicated that the pattern of findings were not consistent across team members from Africa, Asia, and Europe. The psychological safety of home nationals only started and grew more quickly than that of Asians, while only African and Asian team members spoke less and were rated as less competent. Together these results have implications for managers of newly formed multinational teams.

Speak like a Native English Speaker or Be Judged: A Scoping Review

This review aims to examine the discrimination and prejudices toward the accent of non-native English speakers and cyberbullying as the ripple effect of these negative consequences. Following Arksey and O'Malley's framework of conducting a scoping review, 60 studies from 2012 to 2021 were retrieved from the ERIC and Google Scholar databases. The studies were reviewed from two aspects: (1) psychological impact on speakers with a non-native English accent, (2) attitudes toward non-native English accents from the victim's and perpetrator's perspectives. The findings suggested that speaking with a non-native English accent drew negative cognitive, affective, and behavioral experiences. Biases toward non-native English accents were due to the general derogatory perception of an accent and the comprehensibility of speakers' accent and pronunciation. "Accent acceptability" can be inculcated at all levels of education, not only through multicultural education but also through the concerted effort of policy makers and practitioners to seriously address this social issue. Accent awareness can dispel unwarranted and undesirable judgements of non-native English accent speakers. Future studies should be conducted on the effects of social and mental health experiences, particularly of non-native ESL and EFL teachers, given that this may be the only profession required to teach "live" during the pandemic and thus be subjected to public praise or ridicule.

Process Consultation Within and Across Cultures

The purpose of this study is to consider how process consultants can effectively manage challenges both within and across cultures. This study investigates the multidimensional aspects of process consultation for workgroups that consist of diverse individuals in postmodern organizations. A proposed conceptual framework is developed to include factors that are useful for process consultants to consider when working in multicultural contexts. The micro-multicultural framework integrates the cultural mosaic with Schein’s ORJI (Observation, Reaction, Judgment, and Intervention) cycle. The framework represents the multidimensional aspects of cultural identities and explores verbal and nonverbal communication patterns during process consultation. A checklist for micro-multicultural process consultation is also proposed to demonstrate how a process consultant can perform his or her primary role comprehensively while considering process consultation as group-level phenomena.