The Influence of Manager’s Politeness on Subordinates Motivation

Business communication in organizational settings is crucial to achieve the desired results. Managers use speech to manage, instruct, and in other ways get subordinates to perform everyday tasks. This study aims to investigate how speech acts are performed using different politeness strategies, how these politeness strategies affect the motivation of subordinates, and how politeness can be used strategically in certain situations. A case study of two Syrian private universities were used to collect data, the Primary data was collected from interviews with two administrative managers from Wadi International University and AlHawash University. Also a questionnaire was distributed to 12 subordinates working at the two universities. The results showed that politeness strategies used by managers are important for the motivation of subordinates and that different situations and different individuals call for different politeness strategies. Thus it is necessary for managers to make conscious and strategic linguistic choices adapted to a specific situations and specific individuals at the organization.