Upon hearing the word ‘politeness’, many people think of the etiquette of a civil society, while others may associate politeness with respect, formality and similar notions. Irrespective of its actual definition, politeness seems to be a key aspect of business life, which is simply essential for an individual or a team to succeed. This essential characteristic of politeness is evidenced by the frustration that one feels in a rude workplace, not to mention the anger of customers or business partners when a service provider acts rudely: appropriate behaviour is so much an expected part of our daily lives that we tend to notice its absence rather than presence. While using internet search engines is not a scientific approach to describe this phenomenon, results produced by the comparative online search of ‘polite’ versus ‘impolite’ notions speak for themselves. For example, a search for “rude service” versus “polite service” in the popular engine Google Fight resulted at the time of writing this article in 21,300,000 versus 8,700,000 hits, indicating that, a topic of discussion, “rude service” is nearly three times as popular as its polite equivalent.
