The speech act of refusal is an undesirable speech act that can cause negative emotions in the interlocutor and requires mitigation tools in order to maintain effective and conflict-free communication. The mitigation tools are seen as acts or pragmatic moves that accompany refusal to communicatively support the addressee and, taken as a whole, form a speech genre. Like other speech acts and genres, refusal has ethnocultural specificities, which if ignored can lead to sociopragmatic failures in intercultural communication. The aim of the study is to identify the most common models, functional and stylistic characteristics of the speech genre of refusal in American and Russian business communication and to compare the extent of its orientation towards emotional support of the addressee in the compared lingua-cultural contexts. The material consisted of 50 authentic rejection letters to a job application (25 Russian and 25 American) from different companies. They were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively on the basis of speech act theory, speech genre theory and politeness theory. The results showed that the American refusal is characterised by greater positivity, emotionality, verbosity, focus on the form and feelings of the addressee; the Russian refusal is shorter and more informative, it is less characterised by emotionality and emotional sensitivity. The results illustrate the prospect of comparative studies of speech genres with the focus on emotive politeness.