Modern Views of Intelligence
Cultural intelligence is an extension of Howard Gardner’s model of multiple intelligences.
Two recent views of intelligence are relevant for understanding cultural intelligence (CQ): emotional intelligence and social intelligence.
Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s abilities to know and manage one’s emotions, motivate oneself, recognize emotions in others, and handle relationships.
Social intelligence is defined as an ability to understand the feelings, thoughts and behaviors in interpersonal situations and to act appropriately on the basis of this understanding.
While the emotional and social intelligences can describe the required abilities of an individual to manage emotions and interpersonal situations, they presuppose a common set of beliefs about what are appropriate, i.e., a shared cultural setting. They are less informative and predictive of the individual’s cognition, motivation, and behavior in culturally diverse settings. That is why cultural intelligence complements these two other types of intelligence.
Benefits of Cultural Intelligence
In today’s increasingly global and diverse social and work environments, cultural intelligence is an essential capability that enhances managerial effectiveness.
Cultural intelligence holds particular promise for elucidating the leadership behaviors of prospective expatriates or executives already on foreign assignments.
Cultural intelligence appears to offer a plausible mechanism through which socio-cultural values affect individual perceptions, motivation, and behavior. In particular, CQ matters for leadership and innovation in culturally diverse situations.
As intelligence is generally linked to the ability to identify the information that is relevant for making accurate decisions and the speed of producing correct judgments, cultural intelligence appears to be particularly useful in situations characterized by cultural heterogeneity.
One of the most important attributes of cultural intelligence is the propensity, cultivated through long-time foreign experience or a structured training program, to suspend judgment until enough information becomes available in a multicultural setting or in a cultural environment that is distinctly different from the culture(s) known to the decision maker.
Cultural intelligence is essentially associated with (and critically important in) broader and more complex cognitive, motivational, and behavioral frames than the social structures typical of generally homogeneous groups.
Cultural intelligence is not specific to a particular culture. For example, it does not focus on the capability to function effectively in just a single country: China, Germany, India, Russia or Brazil. Instead, CQ focuses on the more general capability to function effectively in any culturally diverse setting.
Basic Aspects of Cultural Intelligence
Research has identified cultural intelligence as a multifaceted construction with four basic dimensions: cognitive CQ, meta-cognitive CQ, motivational CQ, and behavioral CQ.
Cognitive CQ is the capability to cultivate and develop a working knowledge of cross-cultural cues and patterns of appropriate behavior. It is the ability to develop a mental map or a schema based upon one’s previous education and experience to better understand specific norms, practices and the similarities and differences in a multi-cultural context.
Meta-cognitive CQ refers to one’s cultural awareness and understanding during interpersonal communications with others with differing cultural profiles. Essentially, meta-cognitive CQ is associated with cultural awareness and ability to assess and analyze one’s own perception, thinking and interpretation.
Motivational CQ is representative of the inner drive and determination to satisfy the need to learn about cultural differences in varying situations. Motivation is an essential component in cultural intelligence for if the desire to gain understanding and knowledge of how to effectively communicate with others from diverse cultural backgrounds and adapt accordingly is not present, CQ would not be developed.
Behavioral CQ is the ability to be sensitive to changing conditions within a multi-cultural setting and be flexible to modify behaviors accordingly.
The Relevance of CQ
CQ is essentially important for effective global leadership (Elenkov & McMahan, 2005), especially for visionary-transformationalleadership exercised by expatriates who continuously interact with subordinates of a different culture (Elenkov & Manev, 2009).
CQ is also relevant to many other types of people and situations. This includes:
Professionals with global contacts – employees, consultants, marketing and sales managers, world-wide sourcing specialists, suppliers, customers, joint venture partners, and others who must interact regularly with people from different cultural backgrounds.
Members of multi-cultural teams – employees, community leaders, volunteers, students, and others who are members of culturally- diverse domestic or international teams.
Travelers – business executives, government representatives, students, vacationers, and others who travel to different cultures or study abroad.