Your Accent May Decide Your Next Promotion, Harvard Research Shows

Workers whose speech matches their workplace's dominant style are more likely to land the socially intensive roles that drive career advancement, according to a working paper from Harvard Business School—and the effect has nothing to do with merit.

The paper, co-authored by Kadeem Noray, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and Savannah Noray, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program, draws on decades of labor-market data and audio recordings. The researchers conclude that managers reward matching communication styles because they assume workers who sound like them have better social skills.

The pattern shows up in concrete labor-market outcomes. Workers whose communication style matched a workplace's norm were more likely to be tapped for what the researchers call "people-oriented, socially intensive roles"—the positions that often lead to advancement.

The accent evidence is geographic. The researchers analyzed the career impact of having a Southern U.S. accent in the South and Midwest compared with the Northeast and West. Southern speakers were more likely to hold socially intensive roles in regions where their accent is common, and less likely to hold them where it is not.

The same logic applies along demographic lines. For women and minority groups, including Black Americans and Latin American immigrants, the growth in "social task-intensive" employment since 1980 has concentrated in areas where each group is well represented in the labor market. Latin American workers, for example, are more likely to be picked for people-oriented roles in areas with large Latin American populations.

Kadeem Noray, the son of Caribbean immigrants to Canada, said the findings matched his own experience.

"It's not surprising to me the extent that being culturally rooted and matched well to the kinds of people in your workplace actually matters," he told Harvard Business Review.

"The action item is really doing the hard work of creating an environment that is open to many cultures."

For managers, Noray's prescription starts with hiring. He said managers should stay aware of their bias toward candidates who sound like them when making hiring decisions, which may mean staying open to people who do not immediately feel like the right "fit."

"Relax the constraint on the kind of talent that can do well in your firm," he said. "That should give your company a competitive advantage."

He added a broader point about how organizations build their workforces: "If workplaces hired and developed people who enjoyed and learned from the complexities of interacting with people who are different from them, this might allow organizations to better harness the power of cultural diversity."

The research implies that firms screening for cultural "fit" in hiring and promotion may be filtering on accent and speech style rather than on skill—with measurable costs in the talent they overlook.