The Impact of Language on Corporate Future Orientation

Decades of research on organisational behaviour have shown that it is strongly influenced by the socio-economic environments in which firms operate.  Little is known, however, about how organisations consider ‘time’.

Taking a completely fresh approach, Assistant Professor of Finance LIANG Hao from the SMU Lee Kong Chian School of Business looked into how the language spoken in an organisation affects its corporate future orientation, i.e. how it perceives the future and prioritises practices such as corporate social responsibility, and research and development.

In this podcast, he shares this interesting research which found that companies with strong future-time reference (or FTR) language as their working language engage less in CSR and R&D by 7% and 40.6% respectively, as compared to those in weak-FTR language environments.