The Impact of Cultural Intelligence on International Task Performance

Cultural intelligence is a recently introduced concept which explains the ability of a person to successfully adapt to a new cultural environment. With the increasing number of employees nowadays working in international settings it becomes extremely important to have a way to measure if a person is able to work effectively in an international team. However, so far,there is very limited empirical evidence on this topic. In the present paper I will describe an empirical study I did with international students and managers in order to find if cultural intelligence predicts work performance. The participants were first asked to fill in a questionnaire measuring their cultural intelligence and after that they were asked to solve a business task. Then I asked their colleagues to evaluate their performance on the business project. The results showed that cultural intelligence predicts performance on global working assignment. This means that people who are more culturally intelligent perform better than people who are less culturally intelligent on an international business task.

Pavlina Bogdanova is currently a PhD Student at Jacobs University Bremen. Her research project investigates the role of cultural intelligence in selection models. Pavlina obtained her BA in Itegrated Social and Cognitive Psychology from Jacobs University and her MSc in International Management from Bocconi University and University of St. Gallen.