CHAPTER 2

RESEARCH BRIEF

Twenty years ago, researchers confirmed what many business leaders had thought for a long time: A high IQ doesn’t guarantee successful performance in business. You also need the skills that come from emotional and social intelligence. In fact, many CEOs used this research as fodder to tell business schools, “Quit sending us 4.0 MBA graduates who fail miserably because they have zero social skills and can’t solve real problems!” Successful business requires a good dose of common sense and an ability to relate well with a lot of different people.

As a result of this research, emotional intelligence, or EQ, suddenly became the craze. Leaders in all kinds of organizations were seeing the dividends gained by enhancing the EQ of themselves and others. More recently, the same kinds of results are emerging for individuals and corporations that are embracing CQ. Some have argued that cultural intelligence is the single greatest difference between professionals who thrive in today’s rapidly changing world and those who become obsolete. The social skills and common sense learned through emotional intelligence don’t automatically translate into successful performance when applied to other cultures. For example, the very thing that lightens up a tense meeting or builds confidence can have the reverse impact in another cultural context. Cultural intelligence picks up where emotional intelligence leaves off. It guides leaders and their teams through the twists and turns of our frenetic, globalized economy.

As stated earlier, cultural intelligence isn’t just a new and improved label for cultural competence. It’s a different way of approaching the multicultural challenges and opportunities of today’s world, and it’s rooted in research across dozens of countries around the world. This chapter will provide a brief introduction to the research underlying the cultural intelligence difference.

IN THE BEGINNING

The driving question behind the cultural intelligence research is this: Why can some individuals and organizations move in and out of varied cultures easily and effectively while others can’t? This is a question that has long interested researchers across a variety of academic subjects. A great deal of this long-standing research has informed my own understanding about cross-cultural effectiveness. For example, I regularly draw on the seminal contributions of Milton Bennett’s work on identity and intercultural development and Hall, Hofstede, Schwartz, and Trompenaars’s work on cultural dimensions.¹ One of the challenges, however, is the disconnectedness between the many different intercultural models and assessments. How do we pick between them, and how do they relate to each other?

As a whole, the intercultural field has suffered from what some academics have called the “jingle and jangle” fallacy—where evidence-based perspectives get mixed together with people’s personal observations, and where learned capabilities get muddled with inherent personality traits.² Without an overarching research-based framework, there’s little agreement about how to actually assess and enhance cultural competence. Therefore, the validity of the corresponding assessments and interventions becomes highly suspect.³ Furthermore, most intercultural approaches focus on comparative knowledge wherein it’s assumed that teaching individuals the differences between French people and Thai people will translate into an ability to work effectively with French and Thai people. It’s just not that simple. Cultural knowledge and global consciousness by themselves don’t translate into intercultural adaptability and successful results. A more holistic approach is required.

Soon Ang from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is one of the pioneering researchers of cultural intelligence. Ang began to seriously consider the question of intercultural effectiveness and adaptability in the midst of consulting with companies preparing for Y2K—the ticking time bomb that had everyone anxious about what would happen when the world’s computers crossed from 1999 into 2000. In 1997, Professor Ang was consulting with several companies to draw together some of the best IT professionals from around the world to help solve the much-feared technological meltdown. Early on in this work, Ang noticed that the programmers from around the world were technically competent but couldn’t work together.

IQ is an important predictor of job performance in the IT profession because of the complex mental processes involved in coding and programming. And IT specialists’ technical expertise in writing code is a crucial part of their success. But even though companies were putting their smartest, most technically competent performers on the Y2K project, there was an unusual level of inconsistency in what was getting accomplished by various employees. Indians and Filipinos would agree to a programming approach but then go off and code things differently. The company pulled together their brightest and best IT talent, but far too little was getting accomplished, and the clock was ticking … literally!

Some companies attempted to deal with the challenges being faced by doing training on work styles, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. This approach appeared to help a little but the struggles were still significant. Emotional and practical intelligence helped the IT specialists solve problems in their own cultures, but that did not automatically translate to what they could do in unfamiliar cultural situations or with colleagues from different cultures.

As a result of this growing challenge that was facing Ang and her clients, she began to work with fellow researcher Christopher Earley to conceive of a new workplace capability—one that would eventually become CQ.

Surveying Intercultural Research

The process began by studying the most important intercultural theories and models, including those by Hall, Hofstede, Schwartz, and Trompenaars. Most of these approaches focus on enhancing one’s knowledge about cultural differences, such as knowing how most Germans view time and trust building, as compared to most Japanese. But just because you understand the differences between Japanese and German cultures doesn’t mean you’ll actually be able to work effectively with individuals from those backgrounds. And increasingly, we encounter individuals like my friend Arthur, who has a Japanese mother and a British father and attended a Dutch school while growing up in Indonesia. What culture should I study to understand Arthur? The existing approaches don’t adequately equip us to engage with these complexities that are increasingly the new normal. Something more was needed to address the problems being faced in the multicultural workplace.

Surveying Intelligence Research

In addition, the intelligence research was examined to understand its relevance to the intercultural work and relationships. It’s important to understand what they were looking at here as it relates to intelligence. When you walk through your local bookstore, you can see the term intelligence applied to all kinds of ideas. We have books about financial intelligence, business intelligence, artistic intelligence—the list keeps going. Most of these are simply using the term intelligence as a creative way to talk about a particular topic, but many have little, if any, connection to the technical definition of intelligence—mental, motivational, and behavioral capabilities to understand and adapt effectively to varied situations and environments.

The most traditional way of understanding the technical idea of intelligence is IQ, measuring an individual’s cognitive capabilities. But there also has been extensive scholarship on varied forms of intelligence that go beyond the traditional, academic notions of IQ.

After IQ, emotional intelligence is the form of intelligence that’s most familiar to many of us. Emotional intelligence is the ability to detect and regulate the emotions of one’s self and others.⁴ Significant work also has been done on social intelligence and practical intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to understand and manage other people. It’s knowing how to act appropriately in social interactions.⁵ Practical intelligence is the ability to solve practical problems as opposed to academic, theoretical ones.⁶ All three of these intelligences—emotional, social, and practical—predict the likelihood of our effectiveness when working and relating in cultures like our own. Researchers saw the relevance of these intelligences to effective job performance, but they believed something additional was needed to address the increasing cultural complexities facing most individuals and their organizations.

Cultural Intelligence Is Born!

Researchers’ extensive review of intercultural theory and intelligence approaches led to the initial conceptualization of cultural intelligence—an intelligence rooted in the same fundamentals as other intelligences but with a focus specifically on the skills needed to be effective in our globalized, interconnected world. Cultural intelligence complements these other forms of intelligence and explains why some individuals are more effective than others in culturally diverse situations. Because the norms for social interaction vary from culture to culture, it is unlikely that emotional and social intelligence will translate automatically into effective cross-cultural adjustment, interaction, and effectiveness. Likewise, because the practical challenges faced cross-culturally are related to regional and cultural factors, high scores in practical intelligence aren’t a sure predictor of practical success in a new cultural context.

The first publication of cultural intelligence research was in Earley and Ang’s 2003 book Cultural Intelligence: Individual Interactions Across Cultures.⁷ They wrote the book for an academic audience. A year later, a report in the Harvard Business Review described cultural intelligence as a core capability essential for success in twenty-first-century business. Since then, cultural intelligence has attracted worldwide attention across diverse disciplines and has been cited in more than seventy academic journals. Most of the research has examined what gives rise to cultural intelligence and testing interventions that enhance CQ.

A variety of publications exist about cultural intelligence, many of which offer helpful insights on the challenges of working cross-culturally. But similar to other books that use the “intelligence” label liberally, some of the books and articles on cultural intelligence present models that have no direct correlation to the academic research on varied forms of intelligence. Intelligence is a label some of these authors have added to their own conceptualizations of cultural competence. There’s certainly value to what many of these books have to offer. It’s simply important to understand that the term cultural intelligence is not used consistently by all who write about it.

In contrast, Earley, Ang, and their collaborators were specifically interested in viewing cross-cultural capabilities as a form of intelligence, drawing on Sternberg and Detterman’s extensive survey of intelligence research.⁸ This distinction is important for a few reasons:

•   Intelligence research focuses on learned capabilities (something you can develop through experience and learning) rather than on personality traits (something you can’t change because it’s hardwired into who you are).

•   Intelligence research integrates a wide range of research findings from both psychology and sociology. Your intercultural relationships are shaped by both your individual personality and your sociocultural background. Emphasizing one without the other is limiting.

•   Intelligence frameworks emphasize the capability to reformulate one’s concept of self and others rather than just learning about cultural thinking and behavior.

•   Rooting multicultural behavior in the intelligence research allows for a direct correlation with the other insights that have come from intelligence research (IQ, EQ, etc.).

Early into the emergence of CQ, I was in the midst of my own research, which was primarily focused on studying the itinerant travels of North American students and professionals going overseas for one or two weeks. My research revealed an ongoing gap in the travelers’ ability to adjust to the cultural norms they encountered. Yet most of these travelers had been through cross-cultural training and they espoused a desire to be culturally aware. I was intrigued about why their training and good intentions didn’t translate into effective adjustment cross-culturally. I wasn’t content to merely be one more person talking about “ugly Americans” without offering a solution.

But the intercultural approaches I reviewed seemed unrealistic. They were developed for individuals who would be spending extensive time living and working abroad. The approaches focused on learning a new language and understanding the intricacies of a particular culture inside and out. I celebrate the importance of this kind of approach when it’s possible, but I knew most of the travelers I had observed simply didn’t have the time or the capacity for that level of preparation. Furthermore, many of them, like most of us in today’s world, move in and out of countless cultural situations almost daily. So I desperately needed a different kind of solution.

A mutual colleague introduced me to Soon Ang, and I was immediately drawn to her work on CQ. As I began to study her initial findings, I knew this was a research process I was interested in joining. The prospects were extremely bright for using CQ to help the kinds of individuals I felt called to serve. I’m privileged to have encountered the cultural intelligence research during some of its earliest forms, and am grateful to be part of a global research community committed to moving the research and practice of cultural intelligence forward.

Why These Four Capabilities?

One of the consistent threads across the varied forms of intelligence is a set of four complementary factors. These four factors are consistent whether we’re talking about emotional, social, practical, or cultural intelligence. The four factors are motivation, cognition, meta-cognition, and behavior.⁹ These four factors are interrelated, whatever the form of intelligence. A person who knows (cognition) how to relate interpersonally but has no desire to do so (motivation) won’t function in a socially intelligent way. An individual who can analyze (meta-cognition) a practical situation deeply but can’t actually solve it in real life (behavior) doesn’t have much practical intelligence.

In parallel fashion, cultural intelligence is a four-factor capability that consists of these same four intelligence factors—motivation, cognition, meta-cognition, and behavior. The four CQ capabilities covered in this book—CQ Drive (motivation), CQ Knowledge (cognition), CQ Strategy (meta-cognition), and CQ Action (behavior)—aren’t just four ideas I decided to include based on my experience or insight. They stem from theoretically grounded scholarship on intelligence. As a result, many of the strategies included in the following chapters will not only enhance your cultural intelligence but can also strengthen your intelligence in other areas as well.

HOW IS CQ MEASURED?

Once the four-factor framework for CQ was developed, the next step was to obtain input from other academics in business, psychology, sociology, education, and anthropology to develop a valid way of assessing CQ. The question at hand was this: Can you actually quantify an individual’s capabilities for multicultural effectiveness? The Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) measures an individual’s competency in each of the four capabilities.¹⁰ The empirical evidence for using the CQS as a valid measurement of intercultural capabilities was published in 2007.¹¹

Although it’s difficult to quantify something as subjective as intercultural capability, the CQS has amazing consistency across varied times, samples, cultures, and professions. The CQS has excellent reliabilities (all exceeded 0.70) and incremental as well as predictive validity. The CQ assessments resulting from the CQS are now being used widely by leaders in business, government, charitable settings, and universities.

The online CQ Self-Assessment that comes with this book is based on the CQS. It gives you a snapshot of where your greatest strengths and weaknesses lie in regard to cultural intelligence. Obviously, it’s only as valid as the honesty of your responses. The goal is not to see how high you can score. Use it as a personal development tool to find out which of the four areas are strongest and weakest for you. Then you can narrow your attention on leveraging your strengths and managing your weaker areas.

The Cultural Intelligence Center also offers a CQ Multi-Rater Assessment (360°) that combines your self-assessment with feedback from others. In addition to personally evaluating your CQ, your colleagues or peers answer similar questions on your behalf. The CQ Multi-Rater Assessment provides a more complete and reliable picture of your CQ because it allows you to compare your own assessment of your CQ with how others see you. Several Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, charitable organizations, and universities are using the CQ Multi-Rater Assessment in their leadership development initiatives.

In addition to using these online assessments, you also can roughly gage your own CQ by simply making observations with these four capabilities in mind. As you look at your interactions cross-culturally, ask yourself about your motivation (CQ Drive), understanding (CQ Knowledge), level of awareness/ability to plan (CQ Strategy), and behavior (CQ Action).

You can also use the four CQ capabilities to roughly assess the CQ of others. Which of the four capabilities are their greatest strengths? What appear to be the areas where they need the most growth? As you watch and interact with others, you begin to see which capabilities are strongest and weakest and how that compares with other people with whom you interact.

More forms of CQ assessment are being tested, including ways to track your visual and neurological responses to various cultural situations and images. And dozens of other studies of CQ are under way at universities around the world.

MOVING FORWARD

The research on cultural intelligence is far from over. Much more needs to be studied to understand CQ and its implications for all of us. Faculty, students, and industry leaders from many countries are working together to learn how CQ can best be applied. To date, the majority of CQ research has focused on assessing and developing CQ in individuals. But more recent research is examining how to assess and develop CQ in teams and social networks. Can a company have a cumulative CQ score? What about a faith community? Do certain cities and regions display a different level of CQ than others? These are some of the facinating questions being examined.

A growing community of researchers and practitioners from around the world is working together to continue the research and application of CQ. CQ doesn’t belong to any single individual or organization. It can’t. The needs for cultural intelligence are too great. By reading this book, you’re part of that movement. And when you take the CQ assessment, you’re contributing to the next phase of CQ research because your results are anonymously kept and aggregated with those of other individuals around the world as part of the worldwide CQ norms. Most of all, when you apply these findings to your relationships and work, one by one, we can use the CQ difference to make our world a better place to live and work.