Styles Of American And Chinese Interviewers In Job Interviews: From A Face And Politeness Perspective

With the ever-growing economic globalization at the early beginning of the 21st century,Chinese economy has witnessed more vigorous development. More and more foreigncompanies come to China to seek for the opportunities of investing and doing business here.This phenomenon has highlighted the increasing interaction between different cultural groups.Against such international background, China and the United States, as the biggest developingcountry and developed country, have dramatically enhanced their bilateral economic and traderelations and interpersonal contact between them.Although China has been experiencing both social and cultural reform by the influence ofWestern values and life styles, there still exist various kinds of misunderstanding and conflictsbecause of different cultural background. In terms of job interviews, the cultural conflictsbring some obstacles to both interviewers and interviewees. As we know, in order to reducecost and adapt to local markets, an increasing number of multinationals tend to recruit localemployees while dispatching high-level managers from home. On the one hand, moreChinese are provided opportunities to enter into these well-known multinationals, on the otherhand, there may arise some misjudgments, if interviewer and interviewees are not fully awareof cultural differences between them.This thesis covers five aspects that the author believes to be the most important in comparingthe different styles of Chinese and American interviewers: address system, small talk, eyecontact, silence and saying no strategy. The author of this thesis firstly reviews the differencesof face theory and politeness principle between Chinese and American Culture and then putforward five hypotheses accordingly. After that a research is conducted to collect data for thequantitative analysis to test the five hypotheses.Finally, the thesis summarizes both the differences and convergences in styles of Chinese andAmerican interviewers. Based on that, the author comes to the conclusion and proposesconstructive suggestions for interviewees to handle interviews given by Chinese andAmerican interviewers.