"Toward Culture Intelligence: Turning Cultural Advantage into a Workplace Advantage"

P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski

Academy of Management Executive

August 2004, pp. 151-157

This article looks at the expanding field of cross-cultural management. The first approaches in the field focused on the general beliefs and attitudes of people within various cultures (usually countries or regions). Based on these generalities, researchers attempted to identify management practices that would be effective given the values and attitudes that most of the people in that group ascribed to. Attempts to prepare managers for overseas assignments were based on teaching the packet of cultural values that the manager was likely to encounter in his or her new assignment.

The second approach to this topic sought to individualize the discussion by "seeking to understand how an individual's actions are in part the result of national and even organizational values." However, the individual was not thought to be purely the result of a monolithic culture that determined his or her values and attitudes with little or no individual variance. This approach urged managers to be more fine-grained in their view of culture, bringing it to the local, company, group, familial, or individual level.

The third approach focuses on how individuals adapt to new and culturally diverse work assignments. The authors of this article term the factors that allow one to adapt (or not) as one's cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence is seen as being composed of the three interdependent strengths of:

• Thinking—While learning generalities about a specific country or culture may be useful, the authors recommend strategies that help you absorb the critical aspects of a culture when you are in it
• Energizing—This factor refers to self-confidence and motivation to persevere even in the face of setbacks in the new culture
• Acting—One must be able to put into practice the appropriate behavior in its cultural context in order to act effectively in the new culture

Everyone has a mix of relative strengths on each of these three factors. A preliminary form has been developed to measure an individual's "CQ" or cultural intelligence. Existing managers can either be trained to improve their CQ, or the organization can select for overseas assignments those who already have a high CQ.

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