What is Cultural Intelligence?
Cultural Intelligence (CI) is the ability to make oneself understood and the ability to create a fruitful collaboration in situations where cultural differences play a role.
CI consists of three dimensions that correspond to the classical division between emotion, understanding and action:
The emotional dimension – ‘intercultural engagement’
This dimension relates to the emotional or feeling component of the situation and the motivation to generate solutions. This dimension is the 'touch paper' in the intercultural encounter - the thing that changes fuel into fire and contains both the creative potential and the 'danger'; the positive driving forces and the stumbling blocks that can destroy or enliven the contact.
‘Intercultural engagement’ includes the motivation we have to achieve a fruitful inter-cultural encounter. Our motivation comes from both external drivers, goals and objectives such as the need to develop a strategy for innovation and internal drivers such as curiosity or an attraction to things or people who are different. These drivers determine how much of an investment we are prepared to put into any situation.
The cognitive dimension – ‘cultural understanding’
The cognitive component is the objective or rational component. It is based on reason and the capacity to develop mental structures which enable us to understand the encounter, to think about what is going on and to make judgments based on conceptual frameworks and language. It consists of understanding oneself as a cultural being as well as understanding people with a different cultural background.
This dimension requires knowledge about what culture is as well as knowledge about the characteristics of our own and others' cultures. It also consists of cognitive flexibility and the ability to transfer experience from one kind of cultural encounter to another.
The Action dimension – ‘intercultural communication’
This component is about what happens during an encounter, what we decide to do based on our judgments about the situation coming from the emotional and rational data we have collected. The action dimension is the activity and communication during the cultural encounter, what each participant actually does in this encounter. It consists of various types of interpersonal communication, for example, listening, questioning, summarizing, agreeing or disagreeing etc. as well as skills which we have learned to manage relationships in general involving body language, etiquette, rituals, rules and techniques.
The action dimension brings the other two dimensions of cultural intelligence into play.
Cultural intelligence involves a combination of the three dimensions and they influence each other. The three dimensions are all equally important and form the structure which helps us to gain a deeper understanding of the intercultural encounter and give us some options for improving the outcome.
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