Non-native accents and their impact on hiring success.
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2019-06-07
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
This study examined the effect of foreign accents in English on hiring success based on American, Spanish and German-accented audio samples of a job interview as evaluated by Dutch participants. As globalisation nowadays leads to more and more organisations being international and thus employing non-native staff, with the corporate language often being English, the study aimed to answer the question as to what extent a non-native accent would negatively impact hiring success. A special focus was also on a more European perspective as previous research mostly focussed on American participants. To answer the research question, Dutch participants were prompted with one out of six audio samples (American, Spanish or German-accented English) of a fictitious candidate in a job interview and were asked to evaluate them on the dimensions of status, solidarity and dynamism while also giving their opinion on the hireability of the candidate. While there was no clear difference between accents regarding hiring recommendation, there were differences in terms of the other factors and the German and Spanish speakers were always evaluated more positively than the American speakers. This was in line with previous findings about non-native speakers being evaluated more negatively due to their accent and thus managers might take this into account when evaluating candidates in job interviews.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren