Power and politeness in email communication in the workplace: A case study of a multinational company

This thesis sets out to explore workplace communication of a multinational organization, through electronically transmitted messages (emails) involving employees in three power distance relationships, namely superiors to subordinates, subordinates to superiors and equals to equals. To carry out this study a corpus of 107 primary, work-related internal emails, written in English as a lingua franca by twelve participants, was gathered. Importantly, the participants belong to different nations, thus they have different linguistic backgrounds. This study aimed to examine the language use in the informants’ email and to shed more light on how people of various levels within a company, communicate in different ways. Therefore, intercultural communication is used as the principal analytical framework, so as to describe the communication between different employees, from various ethnicities and with various cultural backgrounds while performing a discursive and socio-pragmatic study using...Show moreThis thesis sets out to explore workplace communication of a multinational organization, through electronically transmitted messages (emails) involving employees in three power distance relationships, namely superiors to subordinates, subordinates to superiors and equals to equals. To carry out this study a corpus of 107 primary, work-related internal emails, written in English as a lingua franca by twelve participants, was gathered. Importantly, the participants belong to different nations, thus they have different linguistic backgrounds. This study aimed to examine the language use in the informants’ email and to shed more light on how people of various levels within a company, communicate in different ways. Therefore, intercultural communication is used as the principal analytical framework, so as to describe the communication between different employees, from various ethnicities and with various cultural backgrounds while performing a discursive and socio-pragmatic study using speech act and politeness theories. In this study, speech act theory, in an adapted version, is used for allocating the email messages gathered based on their communicative functions. Further, in order to investigate important pragmatic aspects of language use the theory of Brown and Levinson (1987) concerning universal politeness strategies is employed. The study further considered significant factors, which may influence the linguistic choices people make when communicating through email in the workplace, namely ethnicity, social distance and gender. The findings revealed that hierarchy played the most significant role in the composition of email messages, amongst the three power distance relationships. Likewise, social distance and cultural background were influential factors, however, the study found that gender differences did not play a crucial role in the politeness level displayed in workplace email communication. Interestingly, the study provided evidence that workplace culture plays a critical role and can affect the language use in email communication amongst employees at all hierarchical levels.Show less

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Power and politeness in email communication in the workplace: A case study of a multinational company