Shifting patterns of globalization,
internationalization and political environments can make intercultural
work much more the norm for many organizations. Today's managers
and organizations will be required to work in diverse (even multiple) contexts
of multicultural, multiracial and multilingual environments. These render
ethnocentrism in business even less relevant.
Intercultural differences have long been a
challenge confronting multinational organizations (Hofstede, 1991). In the face of new
global challenges and cultural adaptation issues, Earley and Ang (2003) propose a model
of cultural adaptation called `Cultural Intelligence' (CQ). This is an area
of increasing interest in relation to
work, along with the linked concepts of
`Emotional Intelligence' (EQ) and `Social
Intelligence' (SQ).
The first component of CQ, metacognitive/cognitive CQ refers to
a person's cognitive processing to recognize and understand expectations that
are appropriate for cultural situations. It can be further broken down into
two complementary elements - knowledge and experience. The first
component, metacognitive knowledge, refers to what and how to deal with knowledge
gained in a variety of circumstances and reflects three general categories of
knowledge (Flavell, 1987). First, it reflects the
`person aspects' of knowledge. Second, it reflects `task variables', or the nature of
the information acquired by a person. Third, it refers to the strategy variables or
the procedures used to achieve some desired goals (Earley, 2003). The second
component of CQ, metacognitive experience, refers
to conscious experience about what are relevant experiences and how to
incorporate them as a general guide for future interaction. |
