The Language of Power: an Analysis of a Corpus of CEO Letters

Abstract

One of the many competences (among which developing vision and strategy, incorporating ethics and integrity, building alliances, possessing maturity and judgement – to cite only a few) an effective CEO is supposed to display is communicator competence. Madlock (2008) rightfully points out that leadership is a behaviour enacted through communication. Due to globalization, corporate communication executives are increasingly faced with the challenges of effectively addressing their diverse and dispersed internal and external audiences, which has prompted a heightened interest in research investigating (cross-cultural) variability in style conventions in corporate communication genres such as, for example, annual reports (de Groot, 2008; Hooghiemstra, 2003) or CEO letters (Hyland, 1998).