Business and Professional Communication Quarterly

In a country like Singapore, which is rated high in power distance and low in indi vidualism (using Hofstede's dimensions of national cultures), interviews for entry- level positions in multinational corporations (MNCs) may reveal subtle clashes in culture. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed transcripts of job interviews involving nine English-speaking applicants from Chinese backgrounds and two experienced interviewers from Anglo-American MNCs in Singapore. Our assumption was that a person's cultural background and upbringing influence his or her perform ance at job interviews. The findings reveal that Chinese applicants tend to defer to the interviewer (i.e. superior) and focus on the group or family, besides being averse to self-assertion. Hence, applicants from a Chinese background may be dis advantaged when being interviewed for jobs with MNCs which are heavily influ enced by Anglo-American culture.

Since 1976, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) has encouraged business schools to include ethics in their curricula. Because lan guage is the means for conveying values, including ethical values, business com munication faculty play an important role in deciding what should be taught, and how. But until very recently, most researchers failed to look specifically at actual practices and perceptions in the workplace. To address that need, we conducted a survey of 250 business leaders concerning their ethical preferences and compared our results with an earlier study of business faculty and students. The survey, adapted from one used in the Arthur Andersen Business Ethics Program, consists of 20 narratives which presented respondents with the need to judge the impor tance of certain issues and their approval or disapproval of the action or decision described. We found no significant differences in responses to the 14 items which addressed ethical issues in such areas as creating health and environmental risks, taking credit when credit is not due, focusing on disability issues, deceiving cus tomers with products and services, and using insider information to gain personal advantage. We did find significant differences in responses to six narratives focused on ignoring wrongdoing in the workplace, doing special favors for others to gain personal advantage, and covering up flaws in merchandise or operations. Our results, and the survey instrument itself, provide useful tools for the business com munication classroom.

As participants in a growing number of online business writing courses, students must communicate with each other and the instructor electronically. One group of students may face particular challenges in this environment: those with high degrees of writing apprehension. This study examined the online communications behavior of such students as they communicated with both familiar and unknown audiences via Internet newsgroups. Low-apprehensive writers tend to exhibit simi lar communication strategies in both types of newsgroups. But high-apprehensive writers contributed more, initiated more topics of discussion, and felt more com fortable participating in electronic discussions with unknown audiences than they did when communicating with familiar audiences.