What e-mails reveal about who’s on top -- and on bottom -- at work

How do the e-mails that we send to our bosses differ from those we send to colleagues or subordinates? For one thing, people tend to be a lot more polite and deferential to those who rank above them. For another, we tend to chose our words much more carefully when speaking up the corporate ladder. If you work in any kind of white-collar job, you've probably had the experience of carefully crafting an e-mail to a boss, versus banging one out to your colleague or subordinate. Research shows those differences are actually sharp enough that they can be used to predict whether a random e-mail is going up or down the corporate ladder.

The findings come from a paper by Eric Gilbert of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who studied about 2,000 communications sent by bosses and employees to see what the kind of language people use can tell us about the corporate hierarchy. The study has practical applications, as researchers could use the data to design an e-mail service that could detect when somebody above you in the hierarchy is e-mailing you and send you an alert, so you can appear to be always attentive.