Cuc107 | Cultural Intelligence | Assessment Answers

What is cultural self –awareness, what is cultural intelligence, how they are interlinked and why one influences the other?

How Cultural Self-Awareness helps People to become more Culturally Intelligent?

Why Cultural Self-Awareness Helps people to be more Culturally Intelligent?

Introduction

In everyone’s lives, culture is a significantly important aspect because it leaves greater influence on people. There are some factors where most impact of people’s culture is apparent such as in their desires, values, worries and views. Apart from these, a sense of identity and belongingness is given to people by cultures. When different cultured people interact with other cultured people, the self-awareness becomes most important then (Ang et al., 2007). Cultural intelligence on the other hand is the ability of the individual to adjust in a multi-cultured environment (Al-Jarrah, 2016). In most of the organizations this trait is necessary in the leader as well as in the employees because there are different cultured people who work together in the workplace. This paper highlights what is cultural self –awareness, what is cultural intelligence, how they are interlinked and why one influences the other. The paper concludes by recommending sensitivity towards all cultures which will form a better society for tomorrow.

Discussion

Cultural Awareness is the basis of communication and interactions involving the ability to understand own cultural values, practices, beliefs and perceptions as suggested by Aschieri (2016). This kind of awareness becomes central when one person interacts with another person from different cultural backgrounds.  The perception, assessment and evaluation of a particular scenario differs from person to person mostly influenced by their cultural diversities. One behavior might be considered appropriate to one culture while another culture might deny its accuracy (Pappamihiel &Pappamihiel, 2013). For instance, if an Italian automatically perceives US American as always working, talking about work on dining table, and drinking coffee while crossing the road for office, it does not mean that Italians are the lazy folks and the Americans are the most active. Instead, it means that the value the Italians give to certain activities such as eating lunch or dinner and drinking coffee is due to the high value that they give to personal relationships. Such relaxing pauses are social excuses for knowing each other more and strengthening the bonds more.  In America, on the other hand, time is money. They prefer to give lesser importance to such pauses and concentrate more on the work cultures. They prefer to complete such essential activities by not wasting an extra hour on them, rather they do it while walking down the street, signing a business deal or showing a presentation to the board of directors.

A person’s own ability to adjust and function efficiently in a diverse cultural situation is called the cultural intelligence of that person. In the extremely globalized and diversified work environment, adjusting efficiently is important for the managers, employees and the organization as a whole (Earley & Mosakowski,2004). The knowledge of own cultural intelligence assists to measure the effectiveness of merging easily in cross-cultural interactions properly, the coping ability to multi-cultural situations, and performing capacity in diverse work groups. The knowledge of the cultural intelligence of other people provides deep understanding of how to behave and interact with that person keeping his cultural values intact in a multi-cultural situation (Magnusson, Westjohn, Semenov, Randrianasolo & Zdravkovic, 2013). There are three steps to grow and develop ones’ cultural intelligence starting with observing a particular culture, inspiration and the will to change behavior and action plan according to that.

How Cultural Self-Awareness helps People to become more Culturally Intelligent

A person’s values and beliefs are built by cultural self -awareness. Followers of a particular set of values or believes divides the perception of people. For instance, religion is the greatest contributor of cultural division around the world. If we take up Christianity, it has its own range of values, practices and beliefs which it conveys to its followers. Christianity has its own ways of praying and serving the humanity.  This religion teaches the humanity to embrace and accept other religions with equal respect. Being a Christian myself, I understand that there are other religions too which do not share the same values and beliefs like Christianity. I also understand and accept the fact that they are from other religious backgrounds and thus their ways of operation and perception are somewhere different from mine. I believe that in order to encourage a peaceful and mutual co-existence I will try my best to cope up with the diverse situation and involve in a friendly bond that will be helpful in continuing the work process smoothly in the workplace. I personally believe that above every segregation and classification on the basis of religion, region, race, color and gender, all are human beings and everybody should be respected for their individual culture and opinions irrespective of where they come from, what they eat and what they wear. This consideration has developed my cultural intelligence and made me comfortable in interacting with diverse cultured people in society.

Apart from this, cultural self-awareness advances originality and normality. Erez et al., (2013) suggests that a person having different attributes, characteristics and behaviors is identified easily from the common mass. This recognition makes the person feel special and acknowledged. When that unique person is accepted normally by others, it develops his/ her cultural intelligence and he starts behaving normal and seeing everything normal. This person if handled in such a casual and normal manner that he/she does not even recognizes the cultural differences between them, cultural intelligence gets already promoted in that environment.

Why Cultural Self-Awareness Helps people to be more Culturally Intelligent

It is a general tendency of human society to view their own culture as superior to other cultures. People give so much importance and feel proud at their cultural differences rather than celebrating their similarities which could help them to make the bond of fraternity stronger than before. People always uphold their own values in society and study other cultures just to criticize and comment on them, as argued by Ramsey, Abi Aad, Jiang, Barakat & Drummond, (2016). It is important to know other cultures, but not to criticize but to respect and adopt to make a better society for tomorrow (Herrmann, Call, Hernández-Lloreda, Hare & Tomasello, 2007). Since man is a social animal the episodes of interaction between different people will keep continuing and in the due course, cultural mixture will also keep growing. This social interaction of one person with other persons is the main reason why cultural self-awareness influences cultural intelligence in the day to day lives.

Conclusion

Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that cultural awareness is important in every aspect of life. It is important because it develops the organizational relationship by promoting cultural intelligence and enhances the daily operations of the organization. In normal society too, being aware of own culture as well as of others can reduce cultural combats. Overall it is the respect and acceptance of one culture for another culture which forms the base of a better society or country as a whole.

Reference

Al-Jarrah, A. (2016). The Cultural Intelligence Level Among International Students In Jordanian Universities. Educational Research Quarterly, 39(3), 23.

Ang, S., Van Dyne, L., Koh, C., Ng, K. Y., Templer, K. J., Tay, C., & Chandrasekar, N. A. (2007). Cultural intelligence: Its measurement and effects on cultural judgment and decision making, cultural adaptation and task performance. Management and organization review, 3(3), 335-371.

Aschieri, F. (2016). Shame as a cultural artifact: A call for self-awareness and reflexivity in personality assessment. Journal of personality assessment, 98(6), 567-575.

Earley, P. C., & Mosakowski, E. (2004). Cultural intelligence. Harvard business review, 82(10), 139-146.

Erez, M., Lisak, A., Harush, R., Glikson, E., Nouri, R., & Shokef, E. (2013). Going global: Developing management students' cultural intelligence and global identity in culturally diverse virtual teams. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(3), 330-355.

Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. science, 317(5843), 1360-1366.

Magnusson, P., Westjohn, S. A., Semenov, A. V., Randrianasolo, A. A., & Zdravkovic, S. (2013). The role of cultural intelligence in marketing adaptation and export performance. Journal of Marketing Research, 21(4), 44-61.

Pappamihiel, C. J., &Pappamihiel, E. (2013). Cultural self-awareness as a crucial component of military cross-cultural competence. Journal Of Special Operations Medicine: A Peer Reviewed Journal For SOF Medical Professionals, 13(3), 62-69.

Ramsey, J. R., Abi Aad, A., Jiang, C., Barakat, L., & Drummond, V. (2016). Emergence of cultural intelligence and global mindset capital: a multilevel model. Multinational Business Review, 24(2), 106-122.