Summary of What leads to cultural intelligence by Kerri Anne Crowne:

In the feature article What leads to cultural intelligence, the author, Kerri Anne Crowne
explains her research about the influences of exposures to cultural intelligences.
According to the first part, she explained the definition of cultural intelligence by firstly
described 2 examples cultural failure behaviors due to the unawareness of cultural knowledge.
After analyzing the examples, the paragraph concluded that although working and living in the
new cultural environment forces us to adjust the new cultural settings, some could do it
successfully whereas others could not and would have to receive the negative consequences.
Cultural intelligence (CQ) is defined as a multifaceted competence includes: cultural
knowledge, practice of mindfulness, and set of behavioral skills. The individuals who have got
the cultural intelligence could understand and practice properly across different cultures at the
same time, adjust and effectively adapt various cultural settings. They also could engage a set of
proper behaviors; show the exact culture-based values and norm with whom they interacts. The
third set of skills is the integration and suspending judgment of a particular cultural situation.
CQ consists of 4 parts: meta-cognition, cognition, motivation and behavior. Metacognition could be considered as the ability and knowledge of processing cultural information;
motives; goals, emotions and external effects, better meta-cognition could help individuals be
flexible with their concepts, and be able to integrate the new components into their self-concept.
Cognition is the knowledge of self, cultural environment, structures, information, some specific
norms, practices, agreements that could be gained from education; experiences. Motivation
shows the interest in learning and function the cross-cultural situations which could be explained
by the wills of enhancement; improvement (efficacy); and consistency. Behaviors show the

capability of conduct the proper verbal and nonverbal cross-cultural communication. It is proved
that, CQ plays the increasingly important role of employee-selection for international assignment
as sending right individuals, in aspect of CQ could mean the successful operation of companies.
The second part or research examined the relationship between the cultural exposures and
cultural intelligence. Cultural exposures are the experiences related to a region that aid in
developing a familiarity with or understanding of the norms, values and beliefs of that region
which could improve the cultural intelligence. According to the research, origins of cultural
exposures are: traveling, studying, reading, or viewing television, interacting with someone from
other cultures, some exposures are more significant than other such as: short business visit, longterm emersion; third culture child. The operation process starts at the cultural experiences, and
then leads to the understanding of other culture, even the deeper understanding of a cultures
norms by observing others and their reactions; extensive exposures improve the cultural
knowledge especially since there are the regular relationship, influences, and contacts.
Individuals could learn from their experiences which are different from their own norms,
so that they can select the proper tool, use and adapting the different cultural norms when
necessary. They could also be influenced by other culture; those could change the level of
cultural knowledge, understanding, differences by observing and experiencing situations. There
are elements: time-spent, and how much the culturally distinct and the extent individual want to
undergo, thus the cultural exposures is multidimensional and entails many potential components.
This research also concentrated on the relationship between facets of cultural intelligence
included: meta-cognition; cognition; motivational; behavioral, and the types of exposures such
as: employment abroad; education aboard.

The research point out that in most of case; living and having the contact in difference
cultural environment in both quality and quantity could improve the total level of individual
intelligence (or CQ). There are some particular facets only be improved by some exposure: such
as only education abroad could improve the cognitive CQ, motivational CQ. There are also the
exceptions since some exposures bring the negative effect to CQ as Number of countries visited
for employment U.S. citizenship decreases the Meta-cognitive, and living outside country of
citizenship and part-time student status could reduce the behavioral CQ for some reasons.
Again, the research detail the needs of CQ in international business since the rapid
globalization have processed. The research also indicate that CQ not only useful for people who
travel aboard but also to others. In additional, the awareness of the depth of exposures influence
could be very important as the manager could choose the appropriate method to increase the CQ.
There are 4 methods of increasing CQ level which are education and internship; training;
expatriation; and global leadership. In the first method, level of CQ could be improved by
education and internships, the evident is that U.S. students who studied abroad have a greater
global perspective and greater international career aspirations, furthermore, people who have
been educated abroad were found to be more likely at some point to pursue international
careers or to seek work at global companies. Training could be considered as the effective
tool since firm should consider training individuals in the foreign countries as opposed to their
home country. This approach may be useful not only for expatriates, but also for those who
interact internationally through IT technology. The third method for solving the cross-cultural
communication problem is sending employees abroad for expatriate assignment. The research
states that, in some case using technology to avoiding expatriate assignments could be used;
however, there are some long-term impacts such as less accurately understand of the host

countries people. Selecting the employees could be the considerable part of management, and
managers should consider CQ levels of employees as one of the important aspects of selection.
Finally, the research also found out that, higher CQ level could probably produce the global
leadership, even if a leader does not intend to leave his or her home country because of its
appropriate interactions with different cultural partners, thus bring the positive effect to the
organization.