Making The Connection: Cross-cultural Management Course and Cultural Intelligence

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of the present paper is to examine the impact of Cross-cultural management course on the four primary factors of cultural intelligence (CQ) - Metacognitive CQ, Cognitive CQ, Motivational CQ, and Behavioral CQ and their inter-correlation. Design/Methodology/Approach - This paper is based on questionnaires on two separate occasions that were three months apart. Findings - The empirical findings show that all four aspects of CQ increase during Cross-cultural management courses with a parallel increase of correlations amongst the four CQ factors. Research Implications - As the world economy has become substantially interconnected for recent decades largely due to the advancement of transportation systems and communication networks, an increasing number of companies have begun to expand their business overseas beyond domestic markets and actively operate across national borders. These companies, which are often referred to as multinational corporations (MNCs) in literature, are likely to rely heavily on expatriates to run their foreign operations. Accordingly, there has been a growing recognition about CQ as the key predictor of expatriate success and one of the main selection criteria for international assignments. Taken together, the importance of CQ becomes more apparent than it has ever been before in today’s multicultural business environment. Notwithstanding such emerging interests, still little attention has been devoted to understanding the development of CQ. More specifically, the question of how Cross-cultural management courses contribute to the enhancement of CQ in a balanced way has not been answered. Furthermore, the relationship between CQ development and correlational changes in CQ factors has not yet been extensively studied. In this sense, this paper provides a more accurate interpretation of the effects of Cross-cultural courses on CQ development particularly in terms of changes in the degree of relatedness among CQ dimensions.