Abstract:

Technology and globalization are occurring and overgrowing. As workplaces are also increasing and becoming more international, many organizations currently employ a diverse workforce. The importance of employees possessing high levels of cultural intelligence is thus growing. The underlying reason is when we interact with those people who are different from us at the workplace, we often forget we have different perceptions from others. Cultural intelligence is relevant to employees who work with people from other cultures and those who work together in a domestic environment.

Developing cultural intelligence skills is not easy, and it is a long process where people steadily gain new perspectives to develop better professional solutions under diverse cultural situations. High levels of cultural intelligence do not come automatically, but everyone can create it. Thus, adapting curricula to include artistic intelligence skills might be an exciting aspect and opportunity for future program design.

Exploring and testing the employees’ levels of cultural intelligence within organizations might provide insight into their effectiveness in dealing with culturally diverse situations. Research has mainly focused on testing the cultural intelligence levels of management staff. Studies focused on the cultural intelligence levels of employees who regularly work with overseas colleagues, and young professionals are still limited.

Hence, the research question is as follows: How does Cultural Intelligence affect an individual’s job performance at their workplace?
Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 11 respondents from 8 different countries. The aims were to determine the relationship between openness to experience and cultural intelligence and between cultural intelligence and job performance. The research used the semi-structured one-to-one interview to collect in-depth information and data on respondents’ perceptions and experiences of the phenomenon. The discussions were divided; the first consisted of 7 open-ended questions with 11 follow-up questions, and the second was composed of 18 structured questions based on a rating scale for each question.

For example, the respondents were asked to evaluate their task performances in the past three months in different aspects (planning work, setting priorities, performing with minimal time, and cooperating with colleagues at their workplaces). One of the respondents, respondent E, evaluated herself as a suitable task performer at work. She had good time management and organizational skills for planning work and prioritizing her tasks. Based on these results, the respondents are divided into two groups: higher performance and lower performance. Additionally, all the respondents' physical, cultural, and motivational cultural intelligence scores were elaborated. As stated in Early and Mosakowski’s cultural intelligence questionnaire, people who got an average of each part less than 3 needed improvements in strengthening cross-cultural skills; an average of more than 4.5 shows the full strength of cultural intelligence. Respondents with relatively higher cultural intelligence felt good when communicating with overseas colleagues.

Based on the detailed results, there might be a relationship between cultural intelligence, job performance, and openness to experience. However, those two relationships remain unknown, and further research should be conducted.

Keywords:

New Work, Cultural Skills, Future of Work.