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Successful interaction across cultures requires cultural intelligence. Several aspects of cultural intelligence in organizations are described: suspending judgment until enough information about the other person becomes available; paying attention to the situation; cross-cultural training that increases isomorphic attributions, appropriate affect, and appropriate behaviors; matching personal and organizationally attributes; increasing the probability of appropriate organizational practices.

Intelligence cannot be fully or even meaningfully understood outside its cultural context. Work that seeks to study intelligence a contextually risks the imposition of an investigator's view of the world on the rest of the world. Moreover, work on intelligence within a single culture may fail to do justice to the range of skills and knowledge that may constitute intelligence broadly defined and risks drawing false and hasty generalizations. In this article, we consider the relevance of culture to intelligence and its investigation, assessment, and development. We describe studies from diverse continents, based on the theory of successful intelligence, that show the importance of understanding intelligence in its cultural context and conclude that intelligence must be understood in such context.

Are claims to describe and measure cultural intelligence credible? Three major objections are discussed: (a) Cultures are said to be entirely relative in their values, so holding one culture to be more intelligent than another is discriminatory; (b) cultural studies are said to be a form of postmodernism, whereas to have one central definition of culture is modernist—an imposition of our own dominant beliefs; and (c) attempts to categorize cultures are said to be crude stereotypes lacking subject. The answer to the first objection is the synergy hypothesis: Values are relative, but they are more or less synergistic. The answer to the second objection is the complementary hypothesis: Cultures are different, even polar opposites, yet they converge in a fuller description. The answer to the third objection is the latency hypothesis, for which every value is given face value and its latent shadow lies behind it.

Cultural intelligence has various meanings that can be looked on as complementary. On one hand, it refers to behaviors that are considered intelligent from the point of view of people in specific cultures. Such behaviors can include quick application of previously learned information in some cultures, getting along with kin in other cultures, and slow and deliberate consideration of alternative courses of action in still other cultures. On the other hand, cultural intelligence can also refer to the traits and skills of people who adjust quickly, with minimal stress, when they interact extensively in cultures other than the ones where they were socialized. The two uses of the term are related because people who want to be sensitive to other scan examine intelligence as it is defined and demonstrated in other cultures and can make adjustments in their own behaviors during their cross-cultural experiences.

This article introduces a new, culturally intelligent model of collaboration for global teams that is intended to enhance the likelihood of such teams making creatively realistic decisions. The conceptualization for this new fusion model of global team collaboration draws on the culinary tradition of fusion cooking, current political theorizing about pluralistic societies, as well as theories of in formation processing and political decisionmaking. We describe how the fusion principle of coexistence facilitates information extraction and decision making, and we recommend formal interventions to counterbalance the unequal power relations among global team members. We contrast the fusion model to models of collaboration based on principles of the dominant coalition and of integration and/or identity, pointing out why fusion is a more culturally intelligent model for team collaboration, producing superior solutions to global problems.

The potential for defining a reliable measure of a cross-cultural facet of intelligence has enormous implications for explaining and predicting the increasingly prevalent cross-cultural interactions that occur in business settings. In this article, the author presents a definition of cultural intelligence (CQ) that explicitly introduces the concept of mindfulness as a key component that links knowledge with behavioral capability. It builds on previous definitions by grounding the conceptualization in the cognitive domain and differentiating CQ as a capability that includes skilled behavior. However, alternatives to previous conceptualizations with regard to the constituent elements and their relationship to each other are presented with a view toward a tighter specification of the construct. Also, a developmental stage model of CQ is outlined. Implications for the assessment of CQ are discussed.

We examine relationships between Big Five personality and the four-factor model of cultural intelligence (CQ)—metacognitive CQ, cognitive CQ, motivational CQ, and behavioral CQ. Hierarchical regression analyses conducted on data from 338 business undergraduates—after controlling for age, gender, and years of experience in interacting with people from other cultures—show significant links between (a) conscientiousness and metacognitive CQ; (b) agreeableness and emotional stability with behavioral CQ; (c) extra version with cognitive, motivational, and behavioral CQ; and (d) openness with all four factors of CQ. The intriguing finding of this study is that openness was the only Big Five that was significantly related to all four aspects of CQ. This differs from prior research on openness that found few significant relationships. Our results show that openness to experience is a crucial personality characteristic that is related to a person's capability to function effectively in diverse cultural settings (CQ).

This study explores the relationship of the motivational factor of cultural intelligence (CQ) and realistic previews to cross-cultural adjustment (work, general, and interaction adjustment) of global professionals. Regression analyses demonstrate positive relationships between motivational CQ and all three adjustment criteria after controlling for gender, age, time in the host country, and prior international assignment. Realistic job preview relates to work adjustment, realistic living conditions preview relates to general adjustment, and motivational CQ relates to work and general adjustment over and above realistic job and living conditions preview. This study demonstrates the importance and utility of motivational CQ in understanding cross-cultural adjustment. We discuss implications for cross-cultural adjustment research and suggest practical implications for organizations and individuals seeking overseas assignments.