Cultural Intelligence Article Questions

Cultural Intelligence Article

1. Define cultural intelligence. What are the three sources of cultural intelligence?
Cultural Intelligence is a person´s ability to somehow understand non-verbal communication in a foreign setting just as locals would do. It is also capability to adopt and use these gestures. People who tend to be more detached from their naturel setting are more likely to easily adopt the foreign body language.
The three sources of cultural intelligence are following:
Head – cognitive CQ
Body – Physical CQ
Heart – Motivational CQ
Head is a capability to learn about cultural habits, customs and beliefs while the body part shows if a person was able to incorporate any of these to their behavior. In other words it shows if a person acts to some extend as a part of that culture by trying to do things the way locals do. Last but not least heart is the part that suggests that people need to be confident and they should not get discouraged by any setbacks on their way to adapting to the culture.
As a foreigner I must say that I fully identified myself with this part, because even though our cultures are not as different as maybe the Asian cultures, but there are still things I had to overcome and motivation and confidence are the best way to achieve that.

2. Looking at the cultural intelligence profiles and scoring system, what is one area or skill that you as a marketer would benefit from developing further?
I think that as a marketer I would benefit most from developing further my cognitive CQ. Since many companies think locally and act globally, I believe that understanding the culture is a key to success.
How might you go about this as instructed by the article?
I would try to visit and observe the culture if I had the chance. If not I would try to meet with representatives of the culture that are currently living where I do and try to either talk with them about the differences or try to befriend them. I might also watch documentaries, read articles and so on. Meeting expatriates who spent some time in the culture might be also very useful.
As a manager, what might you do to increase your employees’ cultural intelligence?
The variety of options greatly depends on company size and on budged available for further training of the staff. If the company had expatriation program that would be great opportunity for few best and brightest to experience different culture. I would also strongly support my employees in learning languages because while learning different tongue we learn about the culture as well. Maybe if there are any intercultural training programs, or cultural training programs I would require them to take it. Last thing I might do is to create a team of people who come from at least different backgrounds if not from different cultures.

3. Compare and contrast the meaning of ‘culture’ in this HBR article to its meaning in the Culture and Poverty paper discussed in class. Provide unique examples. The way I understand it is that the HBR article explains culture as set of specific non written rules and patterns that a country or region has been using. These are mostly habits, customs and beliefs that come from history, religion or other sources. People travelling to various destinations should be aware of them and should try to follow them or even have to obey them. As an example we can look at Muslims who consider left hand as unclean because it is reserved for body hygiene. Therefore when eating people should never use left hand. It is not illegal to use it, but it would cause a faux-pas. Another example would be from my part of Europe or pretty much any country that was a part of Soviet Union. If you were to give someone an even number of flowers it would be considered as inappropriate because even number of flowers we give only at funerals otherwise we always give odd number.
The Culture and Poverty article doesn´t clearly state what culture is at least not explicitly. Instead they provide seven perspectives that sometime overlap to illustrate sensitivity to cultural conditions that relate to poverty. In my opinion they take culture of one nation and break it down to more specific parts related to behavior. The behavior is examined from the point of wealth and relates more to upbringing under certain conditions. Therefore it’s more relevant to poverty.
I believe that the examples I provided are relevant no matter from what background the person is, so I´d say that HBR article provides broader definition while the other article deals with more specific problems within a culture.

4. Answer one of the two following questions:
What aspect of culture from the Culture and Poverty paper that is not fully addressed in the HBR paper would increase the applicability of Cultural Intelligence?
I believe it could be the use of frames, because it highlights some aspects and hide other aspects of our social life it the setting where we live, but when we approach a different culture it gives us great opportunity to present a different, better and upgraded frame of ourselves based on self-evaluation. It can also help us to look at world from a different perspective.
Repertoires are second aspect of the article that could be applied to HBR article. Since we are supposed to have a set of “modes of action”, we could expand our repertoires by learning about other cultures and what they would might do differently. This could help us to be more internationally successful because we would be able to adapt to local ways and act like they would do.