The Role of Managers’ Cultural Intelligence and Demographic Variables in Building Trust in Business Relations

Abstract

This article examines the role of such factors as gender, age, nationality, and cultural intelligence in building trust between business partners coming from different countries. The research involved 560 employees, of which 115 were Croatians (20.5%), 114—Russians (20.4%), and 331—Slovenians (59.1%). In addition to socio-demographic questions (gender, age, nationality), we employed the Organizational Trust Inventory and the Cultural Intelligence Scale. The research was made available to the participants online and in three language versions—Croatian, Russian, and Slovenian. We discovered that gender played the greatest role in building trust between business partners, since women rated all trust components higher than men. Cultural intelligence, nationality, and age are not predictors of trust among business partners. Our data contributes to a clearer understanding of the ambiguity of predictors of trust. While previous studies have focused on cultural intelligence as a factor in successful international interaction, our results show that cultural identity retains its importance even in the context of globalization and international cooperation.