Cultural Intelligence and Self-Awareness in Management

Running head: CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE
Management
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MANAGEMENT
Introduction
First we begin by defining the terms cultural self-awareness and cultural intelligence. Most
people find it difficult to see what they do as being cultural at all. Thus cultural self
awareness is the ability of one to stand back from themselves and become aware of our
cultural values, perceptions and beliefs Chao et al., (2017). On the other hand, cultural
intelligence is a measures of an individuals capacity to relate well and effectively function in
an environments that has people from different cultures Lu & Wan, (2018).. Cultural
intelligence is applied by organizations and employers as a way to enhance cross cultural
interactions and also to foster tolerance. Cultural intelligence enables one to become aware of
one’s own cultural biases and respond to situations in the right way. These two are interlinked
because once a person is culturally self-aware then they have a high cultural intelligence
(CQ) and thus they can be able to relate well with coworkers in an environment where there
are people from different cultures (Heine, 2015). .
I have had various from my own experiences and personal observations where cultural self
awareness and cultural intelligence have come in handy and where organizations which have
given their employees training on how to deal with situations that where cultural diversity can
be revealed in normal circumstances (Smith et al.,2014).
In the first instance, my work colleagues and I had gone for lunch at a restaurant. One of the
colleagues was French and he ordered frog legs better known as (“cuisses de grenouille”) in
French. This seemed a bit awkward to us and we felt dismayed by him eating frog legs and
we couldn’t sit at the same table so we moved to a different table and left him all by himself.
The experience was good because since then I have learned to embrace many other cultural
cuisines that are considered not normal or weird. In previous instances I have sat at table
where people have ordered snails and many other different cuisines and from that experience

MANAGEMENT
I have learned to be more tolerant of other people’s cultures. The bad experience that I got
from it is imagining that I can walk from a table because a person was having food that I did
not consider normal. When trying to make sense of the situation , I imagined whether any of
the food that we normally take can be perceived as disgusting or unusual by someone from
another culture or even from someone from another region in my own country (Butler et
al.,2014).
In virtue of the importance assigned to the development of these multicultural competences,
the concept of cultural intelligence has been given increasing interest. The first theoretical
definitions around it established that it was about certain personal abilities to adapt
effectively to new cultural contexts involving four dimensional factors extrapolated from the
multiple loci of intelligence proposed by (Ang & Van Dyne, 2015). These factors are:
Cognitive cultural intelligence, relative to knowledge that allows the understanding of the
rules of social interaction of each singular culture; Metacognitive cultural intelligence,
referred to those strategies that allow to acquire each knowledge, build and maintain
intercultural relations; motivational cultural intelligence, representative of the desire and
confidence to promote and reiterate relationships with individuals belonging to different
cultures; Cultural intelligence enables one to become aware of one’s own cultural biases and
respond to situations in the right way. These two are interlinked because once a person is
culturally self-aware then they have a high cultural intelligence (CQ) and thus they can be
able to relate well with coworkers in an environment where there are people from different
cultures.
finally, cultural behavioral intelligence, which is manifested through the implementation of
appropriate behaviors to cultural diversity in order to establish more effective relationships.
These four factors have been applied to a large extent in diverse global operations and in
cultural training methods Nguyen et al.,(2018).