Impression management through hedging and boosting: A cross-cultural investigation of the messages of U.S. and Chinese corporate leaders

This study explores hedging and boosting as impression management strategies in the discourse of Chinese and U.S. corporations. The analysis has been conducted on the CEO's letter to shareholders of 100 Chinese and 100 U.S. corporations to reveal pronounced variations in the frequencies and pattern of use in the two resources. First, substantially more hedges and boosters are used in the U.S. discourse in comparison to the Chinese, thus,...