Cultural Intelligence

Cultural Intelligence

Introduction

In this globalized world, our every day experiences involve communicating and interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds. Due to the different cultures these people represent, there are possible chances of misunderstandings and conflicts between individuals. Understanding each others cultural orientations is of an utmost importance these days. We must need to learn how cultures play an important role in how an individual perceives things and interpret events around him. If we fail to understand how an individual thinks and interpret things, it will be difficult for us to work coherently with each other in this globalized world. In Australia alone, there are people working in the professional life from all sorts of cultural, religious and social backgrounds. To make sure the productivity of a workforce remains competitive, one must strive to first understand his own culture before evaluating others. Failing to understand your own cultural may become a hurdle in the process of evaluating other people's cultures and the rationale behind their actions and thinking process. An effective strategy would then be to first increase our own cultural self-awareness so that that will also assist us in increasing our cultural intelligence later on.

Cultural Self-Awareness

We just stated that cultural self-awareness is an important tool before we try to understand other people's cultures. To fully comprehend the relationship between these two, it is important if we first learn more about cultural self-awareness itself.

Cultural self-awareness can be defined as an understanding and giving meaning to our own cultural beliefs, actions, judgements, attitudes or perceptions etc (Miller, 2008). Awareness about our own beliefs and attitudes help us evaluate our own personalities. If we become more aware about our own culture, it will be easier for us to point out reasons behind our specific actions and the rationale behind them (Jackson et.al, 2005). The reasons why I am stressing the need to be more culturally aware resides with the fact in this world where borders have become meaningless, we often end up working with people from several different background. A same message is interpreted in a certain way in our culture while it may mean completely different in some one else's. In such circumstances, it is important if we first understand our own cultural beliefs to avoid any misunderstandings and conflicts with other people. We need to make sure we first find out the reasons behind our own way of thinking. If we successfully point out the reasons which make us perceive things in a certain way, it will be easier for us to change the underlying reasons according to other people and perceive the same thing from another person's perspective who may have an entirely different cultural background (Harry, 1992).

Cultural Intelligence

A good cultural self-awareness can be translated into a good level of cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence can be defined as an individual performing with efficiency amongst people with varying cultures and social beliefs (Van Dyne & Ang, 2008). Cultural intelligence helps in underlying reasons behind the actions, attitudes, perceptions of people ...