Tower of Babel Bias: Is There More to Learn about Employee-Driven Digital Innovation?

Abstract

With its origins in medical sciences, systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have gained popularity and widespread acceptance in a variety of disci-plines. The systematic processes ensure an exhaustive inclusion of all relevant material and strength of conclusions. Three approaches are known to improve the comprehensiveness of SLRs: 1) extending the search with snowballing of references and citations, 2) including “grey literature” (multi-vocal reviews), and 3) verifying the list of included studies with field experts. In this paper, we explore another strategy – inclusion of studies written in languages other than English, the usefulness of which is debated. Our goal is to understand whether the Tower of Babel Bias (exclusion of articles based on language) introduces important gaps in evidence. The results of multilingual extensions an existing SLR on employee-driven innovation that included articles written in Russian language show that the extension provides unique insights and perspectives not elucidated in the research published in English, namely the employee innovativeness. We conclude that multilingual literature reviews may be time-consuming endeavors with very limited return on the invested time but may as well result in enriching the understanding of the topic of interest from a unique perspective, especially with respect to regional peculiarities. Finally, we discuss the challenges related to performing a multilingual review.