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P. Christopher Earley is Auran J. Fox Chair in Business and Dean of the University of Connecticut School of Business. Soon Ang is the Goh Tjoei Kok Chair Professor in International Management & IT at the Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Joo-Seng Tan is Associate Professor of Management at Nanyang Technological University's Nanyang Business School.

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CQ

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface........................................................................................viiAbout the Authors..............................................................................ixIntroduction: Positioning Cultural Intelligence in the Global Economy..........................1PART 1 UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL INTELLIGENCEChapter 1 What is Cultural Intelligence and Why Does It Matter?................................19Chapter 2 Preparing Your Mind: The Cultural Strategic Thinking Basis of CQ.....................42Chapter 3 Directing Your Energy: The Motivational Basis of CQ..................................61Chapter 4 Presenting Yourself: The Behavioral Basis of CQ......................................82PART 2 APPLYING CQ TO YOUR WORKPLACEChapter 5 Working Effectively in the Culturally Diverse Workplace..............................103Chapter 6 Succeeding in Global Work Assignments................................................124Chapter 7 Building High-Performing Global Teams................................................150Chapter 8 Leading Globally.....................................................................175Chapter 9 Summary and Concluding Thoughts......................................................199Further Readings...............................................................................215Appendix: A Self-Assessment of Your CQ.........................................................217Index..........................................................................................229

Chapter One

It's clear that cultural intelligence is a source of competitive advantage and a strategic capability for individuals and organizations. Effective and efficient adjustment to new countries and cultures brings dividends to individuals and organizations. What isn't clear is, what exactly constitutes cultural intelligence? If cultural intelligence has core elements, why do these elements matter in the context of developing a manager's cultural intelligence? Understanding why the different elements of CQ matter will help us understand why managers differ from one another in their success at international placements.

Take an example described by the anthropologist Edward Hall concerning his early visits to Japan. After returning to his hotel (a small, family-run place), he found that his belongings had been moved from the room where he had been staying for the past week to a new one. Not wanting to create a fuss, he went to his new room. About a week later, he was again moved to a new room (and again without his consent or knowledge). He again made no mention of it to his hosts, simply assuming that he was being treated as gaijin, or a foreigner, and after a while went back home to the United States. The following year he returned to Japan to another family-run hotel and found that not only did he get moved from room to room, switched, but, one week, even from one hotel to another. After complaining to a Japanese colleague, his friend told him that this was a compliment - only someone considered family would be moved in such a fashion. Strangers are not bothered, but family (or those belonging to the in-group) can be imposed upon. Why do some managers understand that the hotel was treating them as part of the local family, while others assume wrongly that they are being moved around unexpectedly because they are unimportant and have low status? Why is it that some managers who seem to understand what is going on in a new culture nevertheless fail to work effectively? Is this a motivation dilemma or a manager's inability to adjust properly?

SOME BASICS: CULTURE, COUNTRY, AND UNIVERSALS

Before we describe the details of our approach, it's important that we share with managers our definitions of several key ideas in this book.

What do we mean by culture? The most important starting point for our discussion focuses on the distinction between culture and country. Culture can be thought of as patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and reacting to various situations and actions. Culture is gained and shared among people through symbols, including their embodiment in artifacts. For example, in American culture the eagle symbolizes freedom and independence, as every schoolchild learns at an early age. The eagle appears on our currency, on national emblems, on the presidential seal, and the like. The sociologist and business consultant Geert Hofstede likes to think about culture as a sort of mental programming for people within a nation; it's the "software" of the mind, and it reflects a set of imperfectly shared rules for behavior and meanings attached to such behavior.

What do we mean by country? Simply put, country (or nation) refers to a territorially bounded, multigenerational region with a population organized around a common culture and social system.

Culture and country are slippery concepts at times. For example, one country might consist of many subcultures. Many people would use the United States as an example of such a melting pot of views and peoples. Switzerland, with its four official languages represented in the Swiss parliament and regions dominated by various language and ethnic traditions, represents a different type of eclectic country. However, in both the United States and Switzerland, there is an overarching common view of the world inside and outside the country. This is the national culture. Differences among groups of people within the country represent a different type of cultural diversity, which we will return to later in the book.

Culture and country are not synonymous. Although every country has an overarching culture, many subcultures may exist within a single country. To make matters even more complicated, people within the same subculture do not necessarily see the world in the same way. Over time, people acquire variations on cultural meanings because the ideas that they gain from their parents, friends, popular media, and so on are imperfectly shared. Any two individuals from a common culture may hold different views of the same event, and they may share such views with other people in their country but not with one another.

Another important idea of our approach is that some things are understood and held in common by all people, whereas others are idiosyncratic to certain countries and cultures. An idea or object is culture specific if it has a unique meaning for one group of people but represents something very different to another group. For example, the idea of machismo in Latin culture does not really have a counterpart in Anglo culture. A person from the United States might interpret machismo as "manliness" or "masculinity," but this is only partially correct. Machismo carries other meanings, including honor and obligation, that are often overlooked by non-Latinos.

In fact, some ideas are so rich and subtle that they can only be understood by someone who is from a certain culture or who has spent extensive time learning about it. This is why anthropologists seeking to learn about new groups of people will often live for several years with the people much as they do themselves (eating, sleeping, and working with them). The Chinese concept of guanxi has received a lot of attention in the business press and by business professors. Some people mistakenly think of guanxi as corruption - bribes and gift giving. Although this certainly may happen with guanxi, it's not a basic part of it. Guanxi refers to social relationships; gift giving is involved only as a gesture that helps establish and build relationships, not as a bribe. Without these symbolic gestures, the bond among people is weakened.

How does this discussion of universals relate to CQ? At certain levels there are parts of CQ that are universal across all people. For example, people everywhere share an ability to think about new situations and use problem solving to analyze them. Likewise, people are energized when motivated to challenge themselves. This does not mean that everyone is equally motivated or able to solve problems, but it does mean that everyone has some degree of motivation and problem-solving ability.

Nonetheless, some aspects of cultural intelligence are idiosyncratic. CQ is thought of as a unique characteristic of each person, but situation-specific features do appear. For example, the way to address an elderly and educated person in Thailand is properly done with a wai: clasping the hands in a prayer position, with the fingers extended facing upward in front of one's face, and bowing slightly forward. This particular sign of respect is unique to Thai culture (although variations are observed in other countries). The practice of showing respect to the elderly and educated people in Thai society reflects idiosyncratic interests and values within Thailand. It turns out that this is true of many things that we think of as universal. Within most universal parts of CQ rest unique aspects of culture.

Thus, it's useful to think about culture and its resulting practices as cascading downward. At the top are fundamental ideas or practices that are shared among all people. These give rise to various specific practices across countries and regions. Local practices give rise, in turn, to specific practices and interpretations by each individual. Thus, we begin with universal aspects of human behavior and end up with a look at each person as a unique individual.

The top of this pyramid consists of aspects of intelligence that capture high-level capabilities such as memory and recall, logic and deduction, and categorization. However, the specific type of logic and deduction used, categories formed, and so on may be unique to a given group of people. For example, some researchers have found that the aboriginal people of Western Australia display a highly developed sense of spatial memory and can use this for problem solving and memory exercises involving spatial locations. However, their memory using other forms of rote memory exercise is not well developed in comparison with Anglo-Australians. Memory and recall at a high level of abstraction exists for both indigenous and Anglo-Australians, yet the type of memory skill differs. To this kind of difference we note that people vary individually as well, based on their innate capabilities and their unique experiences. This suggests that CQ paradoxically reflects a universal quality that is unique to each individual - an idea advanced by the psychologists Robert Sternberg and John Berry in their pioneering work on this topic.

A GENERAL VIEW OF CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE

Cultural intelligence has both process and content features. We illustrate both in figure 1.1. In the next sections of this chapter we describe each feature and return to them in more detail in subsequent chapters of our book. Recall that the three facets of CQ are addressed by three questions:

Why does cultural strategic thinking matter?

Why does motivation matter?

Why does behavior matter?

Why Does Cultural Strategic Thinking Matter?

The first facet of CQ is what we call cultural strategic thinking, or what psychologists and others often refer to as metacognition.

We begin our discussion by looking at how people store, process, and retrieve information critical to understanding new cultures. We aren't concerned about other typesofintelligencesuchasarithmetic-problem-solvingabilityorspatialreasoning.

Each person has a unique psychological "fingerprint," the complex set of memories, thoughts, ways of thinking, and feelings that we have about the world around us. Psychologists call this our self-concept (the sum of our experiences, thoughts, and views of ourselves and others). Our fingerprint refers to the complex way that we define ourselves, and it consists of many roles that we may occupy (such as manager, parent, or golf partner) as well as the specific characteristics that mark our uniqueness (such as a liking for spicy Thai food or a good sense of humor). People differ in these characteristics and in the relative importance of these characteristics. While all people seem to like some spice in their food, they differ on how spicy they like it and in what type of spice is used. If you think about the seasoning on food as a dimension of a psychological fingerprint, you can see how everyone has a desire for some spices but that people differ - some like lots of salt, some like jalapeo peppers, some like sweet sauces, and so on.

The pieces that make up our view of ourselves are organized hierarchically. This helps us understand new experiences. For example, a manager who places a strong emphasis on central control and authority may easily set aside a secondary characteristic of friendliness to his employees if someone has made a mistake or violated company policy. Keep in mind that the amount of information included in a person's fingerprint (self-concept) is enormous, including his or her past and present experiences and anticipated future ones. However, not all this information confronts us all of the time. What we think about at any given time is largely influenced by the situation we are experiencing. The part of our thoughts active at any moment is called the "working self," and it helps us deal with the world around us. The working self is accessible, active, malleable, and tied to current events. So, for instance, if you show up to work and everyone is in a festive mood because of an upcoming holiday, your thoughts may be drawn to your past holiday experiences and make you feel festive too.

Not only do we have these various layers of self-knowledge, but we also have a complex combination of personal role identities. Every person has many hats that he or she wears at any given time. As a manager, you might go to a meeting representing your personal, business unit, or professional identity. Put more directly, each person has separate identities, such as being a student, a family member, and an employee, and depending on the situation, certain roles will dominate over others.

Take an executive MBA student enrolled in a part-time MBA program. In the classroom, with her professor, she is a student. In the boardroom, she is a senior executive and leader in her company. At home, she is both a parent with two young children and a member of the local soccer club. These various separate identities are ordered in a salience hierarchy, in which the most important ones are more likely to be evoked in response to a given situation. But the salience of an identity is also related to your commitment to the various social groups related to these identities.

Returning to our executive MBA, imagine that a family situation arises as she is attending a board meeting: she receives a call from her son, who needs help on a school social problem (perhaps advice on asking out a girl for the school dance). Does she take this call and interrupt her meeting? Does she postpone advising her son until the meeting is over? In this situation, you might expect her corporate-executive identity to be dominant because she is in a company setting, but if her commitment to her family identity is stronger than her work identity, it will dominate her actions even in the boardroom.

Our example illustrates that our identities interact with one another as well as with the situation we are placed in. However, it's not simply that each identity operates as a perfect match to the situation. These identities are in a quasi-battle for our attention, and the winner or winners are the ones to which we are personally most committed. What do we mean by commitment? It's "the costs to the person in the form of relationships foregone were she/he no longer to have a given identity and play a role based on that identity in a social network," according to the sociologist Sheldon Stryker. We measure commitment based on what we stand to lose if it's taken away from us. The more we stand to lose, the more dominant that identity will be in guiding our actions and reactions.

One factor that influences the importance of particular identities is a person's cultural background and experiences. For example, an employee from a team-oriented culture is expected to have a high commitment to a team identity across various situations. That is, a team mentality will arise in the classroom, boardroom, and home. As another example, imagine a manager in a culture that emphasizes authority and hierarchy, such as India. In such a situation, power-based relationships can support an employee's commitment to subordinate roles, which aids the use of authoritative management methods such as leadership by directive.

The importance of these identities for CQ cannot be overstated. Role identities help us understand why people do the things they do. In class, our executive-MBA's professor notices that when another student is present she doesn't speak up much. After inquiring about this, he finds out that at her company, she is the subordinate of the other student, and she does not want to say anything in front of him lest she make a mistake and embarrass herself. This example not only tells us that her corporate identity is very powerful, but also suggests that her general values reflect respect for authority and power, characteristic of a highly power-oriented culture.

In thinking about these identities in a more specific way, the analogy of a molecule is useful. That is, a person's self-knowledge and self-concept are made up of various interconnected molecules, each of which represents a different identity. Each individual identity, in turn, is made up of interconnected atoms that represent specific information about people, places, events, and so on. Each of these "identity molecules" is a generalization containing information about your general traits, beliefs about the identity, and actions that you associate with the identity, as well as procedures and rules for dealing with various situations. These identity molecules are a collection of ideas and images concerning what you see as both the ideal and the typical state of things in the world.

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Excerpted from CQby P. CHRISTOPHER EARLEY SOON ANG JOO-SENG TAN Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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