Cross Cultural Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Cross Cultural Management - Essay Example Cultural intelligence was described by Creque & Gooden (2011, p. 143) as a set of skills, from fundamental to advanced, which allow a person to demonstrate effectiveness in transferring social skills from a particular cultural context to the another. Cultural intelligence is indeed critical in business especially for a manager dealing with people from different cultural backgrounds. In international business, managers are called upon to relate with partners from different countries and therefore cultural intelligence is needed for good working relations and successful interaction among partners. In light of this, cultural intelligence would be an important to the manager of Global Alliance Company to work with the different cultural backgrounds and enhances their functioning within a particular setting. Culturally Intelligent Persons Triandis (2006, p. 20) outlines various things that an intelligent persons should do. He asserts that a culturally intelligent person should suspended j udgments until he acquires adequate information beyond the ethnicity of the other person given that personality attributes like idiocentrism-allocentrism have to be considered (Triandis, 2006, p. 20). A practical example to explain this is a situation in which during the first meeting with international business partners, they may have low negotiation skills and therefore want they point to be taken. However, it would be wrong to argue that people from his ethic group behave that way but it would be wise to try and explore the personality of the person. Failure to do this would negatively affect future relations with people from this group. Trandis (2006, p. 23) explains that an intelligent person seeks training to overcome ethnocentrism. He notes that an intelligent person seeks cognitive, behavioral and affective training. An example of training for a person involved in international business would be to seek from the internet the cultural behaviors of people with whom you anticip ate to interact with from available literature and the internet. The other aspect described by Triandis (2006, p. 24) of intelligent person is that they are able to tolerate different organizational attributes. An example of this is a person who is transferred to a new company where they have to report everything to the manager in the evening although at his previous posting each employee enjoyed autonomy. An intelligent person would be able to adapt to this changes. Although Triandis outlines the various things that an intelligent person should do, he fails to list tools for measuring cultural intelligence. The challenges in developing tools for measuring cultural intelligence is on whether the tools will be able to meet he quality standards in terms of reliability and validity (Tung & Verbeke, 2010, p. 1259). The other challenge is determining the most appropriate research questions in a given context (Tung & Verbeke, 2010, p. 1259). CQ as a Functional Tool Management of any given organization usually use various tools in order to achieve the set organization tools. However, not all tools achieve similar purpose because some of them fail to be functional. It is important to know if a tool works or not. One of the management tools that most organizations use is cultural intelligence (CQ). Ward and colleagues have attempted to explain CQ whereby they have come out critiquing it as a functional tool. They argue that, to date, CQ has