Today, most organizations are multicultural. It often causes dyadic relationships where two cultures differ in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, politics, social class, and other attributes. The ever-increasing growth and broadness of trades, international intelligence, and inconsistency of labor forces focused the attention of several managers and organizational leaders to introduce and encourage capabilities until they attend to complex and universal dynamic environments.
Emotional and cultural intelligences are the two most relevant emerging constructs that help develop successful global leaders. The combined intelligence offers a framework for a better understanding of cross-cultural leadership and helps classify possible adaptations that require implementation in the leadership development programs of various firms.
Emotional and Cultural Intelligences: Understanding the Concepts
Emotional Intelligence
In 1990, Peter Salovey and John D Mayer coined the term emotional intelligence, and later popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman. Emotional intelligence, abbreviated as EI or emotional quotient, refers to the ability to recognize and understand emotions. Experts pair it with harnessing, handling, and managing emotions. If you are emotionally intelligent, you can handle interpersonal relationships empathetically. With a high emotional intelligence, you can better achieve your professional goals.
Cultural Intelligence
Cultural intelligence (CI) or cultural quotient (CQ) refers to the ability to others and interact effectively across cultures. Since most organizations operate on a large scale, your employees adapt to the respective cultures of their peers. A culturally intelligent leader must prioritize other people’s interests, feelings, and cultures. You need to learn that people in different cultures have different socially acceptable responses, working styles, and lifestyles.
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Emotional and Cultural Intelligences: Essential Components
Essential Elements of Emotional Intelligence
The following are the essential components of emotional intelligence, as proposed by Daniel Goleman.
Self-Awareness
It refers to the ability to identify your emotions and emotional triggers. When you are aware of your feelings, it helps you understand how others will perceive your emotions. You can use your self-awareness to work and understand how your coworkers, clients, and managers see you.
Motivation
It is the urge and desire to do something. It relates to emotional intelligence, as your desires can promote different feelings towards something.
Self-Regulation
It refers to the ability to control and adjust your emotions, which helps create a positive effect. It is essential to control your feelings, as your situation strongly affects others. For instance, you might control your emotions on the job by adjusting your feelings to keep a professional appearance in front of clients.
Empathy
It refers to your ability to identify and understand other people’s feelings. When you understand your employees’ feelings, you handle workplace situations effectively. For instance, when your coworker shows dismay, you can react empathically to alleviate the situation.
Essential Elements of Cultural Intelligence
Cultural intelligence has three essential components. These include:
Emotional Understanding
As a leader, you must use personal efforts and self-determination to engage your coworkers. When you practice the newly acquired cultural knowledge, you succeed in business negotiations and establish successful interactions in cultural settings. The idea here is to keep refining and boosting confidence after a challenging encounter with different cultures.
Physical Cues
It is the ability to reciprocate gestures and show that you understand and communicate effectively within a multicultural setting. Since different cultures use different cultural cues, you engage the physical components of cultural intelligence when you reciprocate these actions.
Cognitive Skills
While engaging and interacting within a multicultural society, your cognitive skills help you understand the basics of different cultures. This component of CI involves your ability to recognize and understand cultural differences and adapt suitable behavior and approach.
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Importance of Emotional and Cultural Intelligences in Your Organization
Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Workplace
Emotional intelligence within your organization helps you perceive, reason with, understand, and manage your and other’s emotions. Its importance in the workplace includes:
Understanding Non-Verbal Communications
When you understand non-verbal communication, you can fix a situation before it becomes problematic. For instance, when your coworker displays signs of sadness, you can take them aside to offer empathy.
Beware of Your Emotions
You can use the skill to adjust any behavior before it becomes an issue for your clients and coworkers. For instance, if you experienced a rough night, you can try shifting your focus towards positive feelings the next workday.
Further Your Career
Emotional intelligence and leadership skills have direct relations to each other. When you actively display abilities, such as patience, active listening, positivity, and empathy, you advance to a leadership role and earn a promotion or raise.
Importance of Cultural Intelligence in Workplace
Enlisted are some key reasons why cultural intelligence is important in the workplace.
Creates Harmony
When you enhance intelligence, your team members become compassionate and sensitive to divergent opinions and perceptions. When you have adaptive coworkers who assimilate into each other’s cultures, they develop a culture of harmony, making it easier to remain productive in the workplace. Besides, if you possess high cultural intelligence, you find it easier to build a strong team bonding.
Boosts Innovation
Your organization depends on your team’s ability to identify opportunities for innovation, such as developing and implementing new strategies to sell a product in a new territory. Cultural intelligence helps develop your ability to adapt to a new demographic while creating an environment where everyone feels comfortable enough to voice their opinions.
Builds Rapport with Customers and Investors
Global partners, investors, customers, and outsourced divisions like to have a strong rapport with a culturally intelligent individual. When negotiating with investors from various backgrounds, it is essential to possess a high level of cultural intelligence, as it helps build lasting relationships.
Encourages Healthy Competition
With globalization transforming the world into a more dynamic and competitive business environment, organizations incorporating cultural diversity are likely to attract businesses and top talents. When your organization encourages applications from cross-cultural candidates instead of selecting domestic applicants, you increase the chance of recruiting the best talent with higher cultural intelligence. The expanded diversity, in turn, improves your organization’s performance when competing within a global market by bolstering confidence while interacting outside the domestic market.
The Link between Emotional and Cultural Intelligences
Despite differences in definitions, cultural intelligence relates to emotional intelligence but picks up where emotional intelligence leaves. Both intelligences are competencies you can learn, teach new skills, and improve your interactions with others. Through both intelligences, you receive assessments, training, and coaching that help guide your learners in the right direction. A combination of emotional and cultural intelligence teaches self-awareness, empathy, reflection, mindfulness, relationship management, comfort, and ambiguity.
Both intelligences focus on how you communicate with others. However, for successful communication and dialog, you first must be aware of yourself, including your emotions and culture. When you are aware of your communication, you gain deeper insights about how others perceive you and vice-versa. Through the combination of EI and CI, you learn how others think differently and how others express their emotions. Another goal that these intelligences focus on involves teaching skills that allow you to communicate effectively and interact with different people; you must change your behavior.
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Conclusion
With the quick transformation of the global economy, more organizations are preparing their employees with the skills to work with diverse populations worldwide. The best possible way to do this is through the combination of emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence. These intelligences are critical factors in the success of individual employees and the organization.
