The Relationship between Cultural Intelligence and Cross-cultural Adjustment

Abstract

The paper advances knowledge in the field of international human resource management (HRM) by elaborating on the relationship between cultural intelligence and cross-cultural adjustment, which has important implications for the productivity of an organisation whose employees form multicultural teams or operate in foreign locations and thus its international competitiveness. The basic axis of the relationship is extended into a complex model in which three categories of factors are reflected in parallel: the mental adjustment of the individual (expressed by the variables of life satisfaction and ethnocentrism), the contextual influence of the environment (operationalised as a cultural novelty), and time (in the form of culture shock). The indirect effects of these three mediators and the direct effect of ethnocentrism on these mediators are simultaneously examined. Using the PLS-SEM statistical technique on a sample of 120 foreigners working in the Czech Republic, a robust relationship was confirmed between cultural intelligence and cross-cultural adjustment, best explained by the mediator of life satisfaction. A significant specific indirect effect was also found of the mediator of culture shock on the relationship between cultural intelligence and cross-cultural adjustment. However, our data did not support the variable of cultural novelty as a mediator of the relationship.