Politeness Strategies in Business Letters of Iranian Managers

The purpose of this study is to find out whether there is any relationship between the cultural intelligence (hereafter CQ) and the choice of politeness strategies in the business letters. To this end, 20 Persian male managers responsible for writing English letters in import and export Iranian companies were chosen. After measuring their CQ they were classified into groups according to their scores in each of the aspect of cultural intelligence, the group with higher scores and the other with lower ones. Afterwards, they were assigned a task which was the same for each writer and they were to write a letter to an imaginary company based on an occurred condition. Then the letters of each group was analyzed on the basis of Brown and Levinson's politeness taxonomy. According to the statistical analysis of the frequency of the occurrence of politeness strategies the group with the higher level of CQ used larger numbers of politeness strategies in their letters. Also bald-on strategy and avoidance strategies were the most and least frequent strategies used in their letters respectively. Moreover almost the same numbers of positive and negative strategies were used by the writers in the letters.