Power and politeness in email communication in the workplace: A case study of a multinational company
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis sets out to explore workplace communication of a multinational\norganization, through electronically transmitted messages (emails) involving\nemployees in three power distance relationships, namely superiors to subordinates,\nsubordinates to superiors and equals to equals. To carry out this study a corpus of 107\nprimary, work-related internal emails, written in English as a lingua franca by twelve\nparticipants, was gathered. Importantly, the participants belong to different nations,\nthus they have different linguistic backgrounds.\nThis study aimed to examine the language use in the informants’ email and to\nshed more light on how people of various levels within a company, communicate in\ndifferent ways. Therefore, intercultural communication is used as the principal\nanalytical framework, so as to describe the communication between different\nemployees, from various ethnicities and with various cultural backgrounds while\nperforming a discursive and socio-pragmatic study using speech act and politeness\ntheories. In this study, speech act theory, in an adapted version, is used for allocating\nthe email messages gathered based on their communicative functions. Further, in\norder to investigate important pragmatic aspects of language use the theory of Brown\nand Levinson (1987) concerning universal politeness strategies is employed.\nThe study further considered significant factors, which may influence the\nlinguistic choices people make when communicating through email in the workplace,\nnamely ethnicity, social distance and gender.\nThe findings revealed that hierarchy played the most significant role in the\ncomposition of email messages, amongst the three power distance relationships.\nLikewise, social distance and cultural background were influential factors, however,\nthe study found that gender differences did not play a crucial role in the politeness\nlevel displayed in workplace email communication. Interestingly, the study provided\nevidence that workplace culture plays a critical role and can affect the language use in\nemail communication amongst employees at all hierarchical levels.
Author: Leontaridou, Aikaterini
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7052122206