Cultural intelligence consolidates corporate vision, strategy across borders

Businesses and industries are progressing toward rapid globalisation, a growing number of organisations have moved to a broader and more diverse set of cross-cultural environments, which call for new forms of knowledge and skillsets such as cultural intelligence.

By entering globally competitive environments, firms face a variety of severe challenges, such as greater complexity and differentiation, the need for integration, and the problem of transferring knowledge across a global firm caused by geographical, psychic, economic, administrative, and cultural differences.

Cultural Intelligence is a measure of the ability to adapt as one interacts with others from different cultural regions.  It is an outsider’s seemingly natural ability to interpret someone’s unfamiliar and ambiguous gestures the way that person’s compatriots would. Cultural intelligence is related to emotional intelligence, but it picks up where emotional intelligence leaves off.

Glitches such as Brexit in the Eurozone and rising trade protectionism under President Donald Trump in United States of America, have limited potential to reverse decades of effort to link the world up through trade and technology.

“Globalisation has resulted in a beneficial integration of markets, capital and talents. While some of it is due to the disappearance of physical boundaries between peoples, much has been caused by technology, making the world smaller; decades after Marshall McLuhan (who never saw the Internet) first used the term “Global Village” said Eugene Ohu, faculty, department of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources at the Lagos Business School in an emailed note.

“Businesses now have access to more qualified talents who now collaborate with more ease across the globe” Ohu affirmed.

Cultural intelligence advances corporate vision, helps in the formulation and execution of corporate strategy with measurable impact on the bottom line. This is critical because with globalisation and internationalisation of businesses, understanding the impact of an individual’s cultural background on their behaviour has become essential for management and a core component of effective business leadership.

There are many types of culture, such as national culture, which in Africa can be as diverse as the number of languages, ethnic and geographical groupings.  Knowledge of these and especially of one’s ability to adapt as one journeys through the continent will be helpful to executives with businesses in the region, or who are planning to expand to Africa.

Ohu added that business leaders are needed who can guide interactions between team members from different national, ethnic and occupational culture.  Such leaders need to develop four essential CQ capabilities: Knowledge (of other cultures); Sensitivity (to other cultures); Motivation (to learn about other cultures) and the behaviour skills and flexibility to learn new ways of doing things.

Resourcing & Talent Management experts contend that there are two layers to cultural intelligence in a corporate or business environment: intra-cultural intelligence (among departments and teams of the organisation) and inter-cultural intelligence (intelligence needed to thrive across cultures).

How diversity is managed in an organisation does affect performance and the bottom line; diversity in the sense that you encourage people to be different. This might refer to work structure or processes in an organisation.

At the level of intra-cultural intelligence, an organisation might want to examine its structures. For example, do the structures encourage cross-departmental collaboration? Does it promote job rotation within the organisation? If the answer is yes, you would find there is cross-fertilisation of ideas, information is shared and the organisation leverages on this information sharing mode. This in turn promotes a culture of openness and a realisation that it is okay to challenge the status quo.

The other component which is inter-cultural intelligence helps an organisation to consciously establish programmes to integrate people of diverse cultural backgrounds. For instance culture awareness sessions are helpful in helping individuals navigate new cultural landscapes. This is followed by assimilation sessions. These sessions are designed to help the individual go through a process of acculturation and have inbuilt feedback mechanisms to facilitate understanding among those involved.

P. Christopher Earley, chair, department of organisational behaviour at the London School of Business and Elaine Mosakowski professor of management at the University of Colorado at Boulder, asserted in a research paper that unlike other aspects of personality, cultural intelligence can be developed in psychologically healthy and professionally competent people. A person with high cultural intelligence can somehow tease out of a person’s or group’s behaviour those features that would be true of all people and all groups, those peculiar to this person or this group, and those that are neither universal nor idiosyncratic.

 

STEPHEN ONYEKWELU