Reflection on Cultural Intelligence and Self-Awareness

This reflection explores the impact of cultural self-awareness on cultural intelligence, discussing the importance of understanding one's own cultural behaviors and the challenges of cultural differences. It emphasizes the role of cultural self-awareness in enhancing cultural intelligence and the process of adjustment in different cultural contexts.

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2018
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Culture is formed with so many aspects (Spencer-Oatey, 2012). According to various
individuals, cultural issues are faced in society and workplace (Hjarvard, 2008). This cultural
issues and problems raised from individual gender, cultural background, personality, religion and
so on. This makes the significance of cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence is defined as the
capability of an individual to resolve cultural issues in both society and workplace (Thomas et al,
2015). For the depth knowledge of the cultural intelligence, it is first important to know various
aspects associated with cultural awareness (Stephanie & Cantatore, 2013). In my opinion,
cultural self-awareness occurred since we were born. Therefore, this reflection will be based on
the summary of research on cultural intelligence and also on an analysis of how does the cultural
self-awareness impact cultural intelligence.
To enhance cultural intelligence, cultural self-awareness if the first step. I believe that cultural
self-awareness has been decided since we are born, due to my family, religion and background.
There is also a cultural difference from one country to another (Ang, Rockstuhl & Tan, 2015).
For instance, the Chinese culture differs from western culture in many ways. In terms of simple
example, Chinese use chopsticks while fork and knife were used by Western countries people.
Moreover, cultural behaviour is also directly influenced by our family. People can see this
difference in various public places or street. For instance, a child is crying for parent to purchase
some lolly for him. One family will say, “No, it is time for dinner” but for another family, they
will buy lolly for him as they cannot see their child crying. Hence, the diverse family background
will induce different experience to child and they probably inherit behaviour from their family
and thus learn the things in same way that parent did. “Identifying how culture moulds your own
behaviour is the first stage to being able to recognize the impact of cultures on others” (Wang,
2016). When individuals know their cultural behaviour completely, they will able to build new
cultural behaviour in searching for their own value.
Cultural self-awareness helps people to learn what the individual cultural behaviours are, but
only learning of specific cultural is not sufficient as it is also important to consider “human
select, interpret, process and using of information” (Gaia, 2015). In addition, one two persons
from different culture communicate with one another, however, they cannot understand and feel
confused about the things another person is talking about, we stated this as culture shock. This
happens when people cannot learn or understand new things at one time. In the domain,

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individuals are used to comparing two different cultures and background and thus later on
grandly declared that which culture is best. This behaviour of individuals towards various
cultures creates difficulty in living in a society and workplace.
Leiper et al (2008) states that “culture signifies both individual and social construct”. To build
cultural intelligence, sharing is the only way as when you communicate with the person who
belongs to different background and culture, you are sharing your value and behaviour.
Sometimes, this help in learning of the individual and bound them in social activities. As per my
personal experiences, many of my friends are not belong to the same city as me. There are 34
provinces in China and also extensive variations across the nation, also we have eight largely
cuisines around China (Xikui, 2018). Hence, I always concerned about what should we order
when we go out for lunch. During my first lunch, a particular issue comes that my friend like
salty taste and on the other hand, I look for light taste. Due to my cultural self-awareness, it is
very difficult to change, but we both like spicy food. After three months, we adjust one another
taste; however, we still keep our personal taste alongside. This event taught me how cultural
awareness could help in enhance culture intelligence.
Cultural intelligence can also be defined as a process of adjustment. Every individual tries to get
a good position in a workroom or received their degrees in the academia. In realism, individuals
have to do various unfamiliar behaviours and identify what they have to do for their bright future
keeping in mind various factors. Since people need to improve their cultural intelligence if they
want to improve their quality of life. Before individual go outside for the purpose of study or
become a volunteer, they might have not passed through the stage of stress and thus they also not
need of depth of cultural intelligence to help them for their survival in the community. However,
when people face difficulty, they learn and recognizes that cultural intelligence is significantly
necessary and thus they were going to adjust time after time. It can also be said that individual
cultural intelligence is increased with practice, experience and positive behavior towards lifetime
learnings.
In this reflection, I totally believe that for building cultural intelligence, cultural self-awareness is
totally important. In various statements above, I used various necessary key sources to state how
does cultural intelligence is impacted by cultural self-awareness. There are cultural differences
between individuals and this also rise to culture shock and make it difficult to adjust to culture

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(Flanja, 2009). In addition, I have added my personal experiences as an example for the purpose
of effective explanation that what is individual and social construct. The experiences in everyone
life also form a part of cultural differences. Moreover, culture can both individual and social and
individual need to blend into social to share social values. The progress in cultural intelligence
can be seen when people face certain difficulties. Therefore, cultural self-awareness will be
having a significant influence on cultural intelligence with respect to many factors.

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References
Ang, S., Rockstuhl, T., & Tan, M. L. (2015). Cultural intelligence and
competencies. International encyclopedia of social and behavioral sciences, 2(1), 433-
439.
Flanja, D. (2009). Culture shock in intercultural communication. Studia Universitatis Babes-
Bolyai. Studia Europaea, 54(4), 107.
Gaia, A. C. (2015). Short-term faculty-led study abroad programs enhance cultural exchange and
self-awareness. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 14(1), 21-
31.
Hjarvard, S. (2008). The mediatization of society. Nordicom review, 29(2), 102-131.
Russell, K. M. (2011). Growing Up A Third Culture Kid. Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 9(1).
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012). What is culture? A compilation of quotations. GlobalPAD Core
Concepts.
Stephanie, Q. U. A. P. P. E., & Cantatore, G. (2013). What is Cultural Awareness, anyway? How
do I build it?.
Thomas, D. C., Liao, Y., Aycan, Z., Cerdin, J. L., Pekerti, A. A., Ravlin, E. C., ... & Moeller, M.
(2015). Cultural intelligence: A theory-based, short form measure. Journal of
International Business Studies, 46(9), 1099-1118.
Wang, Q. (2016). Remembering the self in cultural contexts: A cultural dynamic theory of
autobiographical memory. Memory Studies, 9(3), 295-304.
Xikui, L. (2018). The role of the provinces in China’s development. Retrieved December 17,
2018, from http://www.regionsunies-fogar.org/en/join-oru/opinion-articles/395-the-role-
of-the-provinces-in-china-s-development

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Leiper, J., Van Horn, E. R., Hu, J., & Upadhyaya, R. C. (2008). Promoting cultural awareness
and knowledge among faculty and doctoral students. Nursing Education
Perspectives, 29(3), 161-164.