Should we measure cultural intelligence?

Abstract

Although we have not published an article on cultural intelligence in this current issue, we have certainly published our share over the last 20 years in International Journal of Cross Cultural Management: 17 articles with ‘cultural intelligence’ in the title, 19 in the abstract, and 107 where the term is mentioned anywhere in the text. When I search Google on the term ‘cultural intelligence’ I get about 2,320,000,000 results. On Google Scholar I get 3,820,000. The term is often abbreviated to CQ, with the ‘Q’meaning ‘Quotient’. This word is defined as ‘a particular degree or amount of something’ by the Cambridge English dictionary, implying in this case that the amount of cultural intelligence a person has can be measured. The word ‘intelligence’ suggests that cultural intelligence is a part of general intelligence, and that like IQ it can be measured. ‘Cultural’ suggests a measure of that part of intelligence that pertains to an individual’s manifestation of their understanding and interpretation of different cultural contexts and the way that those within these contexts may think, feel and behave and what they value. Or, in short CQ is ‘A person’s capability for successful adaptation to new cultural settings, that is, for unfamiliar settings attributable to cultural context’, in the words of Earley and Ang’s (2003: 9) early work, when the concept was introduced to the world. The term is applied across cultural contexts and mostly assumed to be a universal concept that can be understood, applied and measured anywhere, regardless of cultural context and background of the individual being measured, although this assumption has been criticised more recently (e.g. Ward et al., 2009), of which more later.