The linguistic patterns that lead to rapport management, trust, interactional justice, support, and leader -member exchange

Claims have been made about the impact of applying linguistic politeness theory to workplace contexts. That is, linguistic politeness theory, which has historically been a social theory, has been hypothesized to be effective when applied to a context of leaders and members. However, these claims have not been empirically examined. Therefore, it is the intent of this dissertation to examine the impact of a leader's use of linguistic politeness strategies on workplace outcomes like rapport management, trust, supervisory support, interactional justice, and leader-member exchange. The specific linguistic politeness strategies that were examined included syntactic structure of a speech act (direct versus indirect) and optional moves (supportive moves, downgraders, and aggravating moves).;An experiment was conducted that asked participants to read 20 emails that were written from a perspective of a hypothetical team leader. A 2 x 3 research design was used with each set of emails representing a different linguistic condition. That is, there were 6 total conditions tested. After participants read the emails, they were asked to complete a posttest survey that measured rapport management, trust, supervisory support, interactional justice, and leader-member exchange.;The results indicated that leaders who used mitigating politeness strategies were more effective in building perceptions of rapport management, trust, supervisory support, interactional justice, and leader-member exchange. Further, the results also indicated that for the dependent variables of trust and supervisory support, the effectiveness of optional moves relied on whether a speech act was presented directly or indirectly. This finding seems to indicate that the effectiveness of linguistic politeness strategies may heavily rely upon the syntactic structure of a speech act. One possible explanation that was given for this finding was that leaders who presented linguistically consistent messages to their group members effectively built perceptions of trust and support.;Overall, this dissertation both confirmed and deviated from claims made in linguistic politeness literature. The results of the study will be applied to future research studies that may examine the effect of consistency and sincerity on other workplace outcomes.