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A person’s accent provides a tremendous amount of social information, and like differences in ethnicity and skin color, accents contribute to social categorization perceptions. With increasing worldwide labor mobility, organizations are likely to employ persons with nonnative accents, which can sometimes engender tension, conflict, workplace disruption and potentially even legal costs. A leading example stems from a 2012 case in California where dozens of Filipino hospital workers obtained nearly $1m in settlement after claiming they were harassed for speaking with an accent. This case is just one of many examples highlighting that workplace conflict can stem from perceived problems with accent disparity. As such, we propose that there is increasing imperative to better understand the experience of nonnative speakers in interpersonal interactions at work.
Research conducted in North America shows that native English speakers view nonnative English speakers as less intelligent, less competent, less loyal and lower in status, especially when their accents are perceived as difficult to comprehend (Gluszek and Dovidio, 2010). It has also been shown that accented individuals, in general, are perceived as less pleasant to listen to than non-accented speakers (Lindemann, 2003), less credible (Lev-Ari and Keysar, 2010), have less political skills or ability to influence (Huang et al., 2013) and the stronger the accent the more negatively accented individuals are evaluated (Gluszek and Dovidio, 2010). Misunderstandings and deep frustrations can often occur due to nonnative speakers’ accents and these factors may also influence perceptions of status or competence such that a person with a nonnative accent may be perceived as embodying lower status or competence regardless of his/her actual competence (Brett et al., 2006). While much is known about how native speakers, especially native English speakers, tend to view those with nonnative English accents, much less is known about how nonnative speakers themselves internalize these biases and stereotypes when they interact with native speakers. This is a significant omission, and our research specifically addresses gaps in our knowledge of how nonnative speakers feel and interact with native speakers.
We propose that nonnative English speakers are sensitive to the existence of their accents, and that stereotype threat is a central mechanism explaining how they respond to workplace conflicts and disagreements. Stereotype threat (Steele and Aronson, 1995) theory posits that...