Cross-cultural impression management in the multicultural workplace: The special case of Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper investigates the spoken discourse of Chinese and Western members of staff in a series of multi-party managerial-level cross-cultural business meetings at a large Hong Kong-based airline. The analysis is based on a corpus of naturally occurring meetings audio-and video-recorded at the airline. Specifically, the discourse used by each group to realise certain directive speech acts (requests, commands and suggestions) is analysed. A model of discourse is proposed which employs the concept of impression management to explain how (i) speakers project certain impressions of themselves to others, and (ii) hearers attribute characteristics to speakers on the basis of their discourse. Impression management (IM), it is argued, is a central and universal function of discourse, irrespective of speaker ethnicity, although it may be applied variably by different individuals in different situations. The Cross-Cultural Impression Management (CCIM) discourse model suggests (i) that the attribution process is significantly affected by the cultural backgrounds of both speakers and hearers, and (ii) that 'discordant' attributions may lead to the reinforcement of negative person-perceptions, which, in turn, may result in distorted communication. This paper considers some of the ways in which spoken discourse contributes to attributions of 'authoritativeness' in cross-cultural encounters.