Communication styles at work: How do members of different national cultures deal with information requests and directives when writing emails?

Ever since globalization began changing the world by removing geographical barriers, the exchange of information and knowledge has become easier thanks to the Internet and the use of English as a global lingua franca. In the business arena, one of the most common forms of communication is probably emails, which have replaced traditional communication methods such as by letter, fax, and telephone (Lightfoot 2006). Emails are so cheap, easy to store, retrieve, forward, and send to multiple recipients whenever needed (Crystal 2006; Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta 2005) that even small companies can generate an enormous volume of email traffic to fulfil their daily tasks, with tremendous amounts of data being exchanged (Laclavík and Maynard 2009). Bearing in mind that different national cultures have an impact on communication styles (Gudykunst, Ting-Toomey and Chua 1988; De Mooij 2014), the present contribution focuses on three corpora of 100 emails each, written by the Japanese, Chinese and Emirati employees of a multinational freight-forwarding company with a view to comparing the communication styles adopted when interacting with colleagues from a different country within the time constraints connected with the common field of operation. In particular, the analysis aims to explore the strategies deployed to tackle potentially face-threatening speech acts like information requests and directives. The results show that cultural differences in email are present and can be explained by Hofstede’s dimensions of power-distance, individualism versus collectivism, uncertainty-avoidance and short- versus long term orientation. In particular, power-distance and short- versus long term orientation have a significant impact on the preference for promptness, task-relatedness, and relationship-relatedness in email communication.