Emotional Capital Within the Cultural Dimensions Framework

Abstract

Emotional capital (EC) has become an important concept in educational and intercultural communication. It is shown to be a booster capital potentializing human, social, and cultural capitals. The competencies comprising emotional capital are learned from the early ages through socialization process and get consistently reshaped in different contexts. Accordingly, the present study aims at exploring how cultural dimensions and emotional capital are related using Hofstede’s cultural framework. To this end, Emotional Capital Questionnaire was distributed among 180 students from Iran, the Unites States, China, Brazil, and India. The results revealed considerable cultural differences in the level of learners’ EC. Also, cultural specificity of emotional skills was confirmed using MANOVA. Further analyses have shown that cultures which emphasized maintenance of social order––that is, those with higher levels of masculinity and long-term orientation tended to have higher scores on EC. In contrast, in countries where people minimized the maintenance of social order and emphasized uncertainty avoidance tend to have lower scores on EC. In the end, practical implications of these findings are discussed, and future research directions are provided.