Workplace emails reveal cultural differences

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FOR most of us working behind an office computer every day, dealing with emails takes up a significant part of our time. Yet many will be blissfully unaware that in the process of drafting the emails, cultural differences often dictate the linguistic strategies we use to maintain rapport or assert power with our colleagues.

New research from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand has revealed that these cultural differences typically govern what we write in our emails and how we write them.

Conducted by Jackie Yeoh, who graduated from the university last year with a PhD in Applied Linguistics, the study found that a range of socio-cultural forces are at play during the seemingly simple process.

Yeoh said she was inspired to compare the way people in different countries communicate through business emails while she was working for several large organisations in Malaysia.

“I noticed in the course of my work that some Malaysian colleagues tended to use the imperative mood (direct commands such as ‘Give me that report by 2pm’) when making requests of their colleagues, which could be interpreted as rather forceful and sometimes impolite.

“I had to manage a group of staff and I realised that it was at times difficult to assert power and authority via email and at the same time maintain good rapport with those who reported to me,” she said.

Yeoh conducted the research by collecting more than 1,700 internal work-related emails from two companies in New Zealand and one in Malaysia.

Through this, she found that these companies used different strategies in their efforts to maintain good office relationships and to express power.

Across all the three workplaces she studied, she found that similar styles were used to assert authority.

“They all used imperative mood, boosting devices (terms like ‘ASAP’ and ‘of course’) and the personal pronoun ‘I’. The use of a combination of these strategies clearly showed that more emphasis was placed on getting the job done rather than maintaining rapport in these workplaces,” Yeoh explained.

However, the case was different when it came to the strategies used to maintain an amicable and collaborative environment at the workplace.

“In the New Zealand workplaces, an informal greeting such as ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello’ plus the recipient’s first name were used regardless of the relative status of the participants.

“In the Malaysian workplace, participants greeted their superiors with the more formal ‘Dear’ plus the recipient’s title followed by their first name. Failure to do this was deemed disrespectful,” said Yeoh, who experienced for herself the stark differences in email styles between New Zealand and Malaysia in the early days of her PhD research.

“I was shocked when a potential supervising professor in New Zealand asked me to address her by her first name. In my culture where status and titles are given emphasis, it is considered disrespectful and rude to address someone who is of higher status with only the first name. It took me a long time to get used to this style of informal writing,” she said.

For more information on the Victoria Business School, go to www.victoria.ac.nz.

Information on study options in New Zealand can be found at www.studyinnewzealand.com.