In this lesson I'm going to talk about cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence has been a growing area of research, as well as a growing area of interest for organizations as they become more globalized.
We can define cultural intelligence as the individual's capability to function and manage effectively cultural diverse setting. Cultural intelligence is part of a broadening definition of intelligence. It used to be that we only looked at cognitive ability as a reflection of intelligence, but the more and more today we talk about social intelligence, this ability to you know act wisely in human relations and to manipulate other people, as well as emotional intelligence, this ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of one's self and of others and of groups.
When we talk about cultural intelligence, we talk about the different components in this intelligence. So in the next four slides, I will review these components. The first is metacognitive cultural intelligence. This is how a person makes sense of intercultural experiences. It reflects the processes that individuals use to acquire and understand cultural knowledge. It really occurs when people make judgement about their own thought process and those of others. So it includes things like thinking ahead before you have any intercultural encounter, checking your assumptions during the encounter and adjusting them as you find one formation or learn something new. This is something that is very difficult to train employees to do. So it's something that is almost innate in individuals.
A second component is a cognitive cultural intelligence, and this is something that you can learn. This is basically something that you train your employees to have or to increase. It's a person's understanding of how cultures are similar, how they are different, its general knowledge about different cultures, and it includes things like knowing the economic and legal systems of different countries, knowing the norms of how to behave in social interactions. You know, what religious beliefs in different cultures mean, what is considered aesthetic and what's considered not aesthetic. And you know to know different languages or to know the language of the people from the cultures that you work with and so on. And you can watch a small clip, a short clip, of doing business in China to see how you can learn these things pretty easily if you have, you know, enough resources.
The third factor in cultural intelligence is motivational cultural intelligence, and that's simply how open you are and interested you are in experiencing other cultures and interacting with people from difference cultures. Some people don't want to be really. They are you know, they're comfortable with people they know, which they can predict how they behave and so on that they don't have this openness to experience people from different cultures, different food, you know, different languages, and so on. This is again something that you can't train. This is something that you can select for in employees, but you can't really train employees to have greater motivational cultural intelligence.
The last component of cultural intelligence is behavioral cultural intelligence, or CQ. That's a person's capability to adapt verbal and nonverbal behavior on their own, so it's appropriate for different cultures. For example, it's how fast you can learn how polite or direct you should be, how you can walk. These are things that are cultural. How far do you stand from a person when you speak to them? In some cultures, you stand very close to a person, even if you don't know them. If you do that in another culture, you'll make a person uncomfortable, and they'll keep backing up. It goes back to having a flexible repertoire of behavioral responses that are appropriate in a variety of situations. Having the capacity to modify both verbal and nonverbal behavior based on the interaction in a setting that you're involved in. Again, it's something that can be trained to a certain degree, how to behave in different cultures, especially if you prepare someone for interacting and operating in a specific culture.