Cultural Intelligence and Language Competence: Synergistic Effects on Avoidance, Task Performance, and Voice Behaviors in Multicultural Teams

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Peyrols Wu ◽  
Kok‐Yee Ng
Author(s):  
Shoma Mukherji ◽  
Neera Jain ◽  
Radha Sharma

Business environment world over has undergone major transformation in the last fifty years. Global organisations, where operations are not restricted to home or host country, need business leaders with a global mindset and multicultural effectiveness. This paper examines and confirms the relevance on leadership preparedness of global managers of two important constructs – cultural intelligence and communication effectiveness in the context of anxiety and uncertainty management. Adding to extant literature, the study empirically confirms the suitability of three assessment instruments. It establishes the importance of cultural adaptability and AUM theory for assessing leadership potential of managers working in multicultural environments with culturally diverse teams. The objective of this study is to understand the relevance of cultural intelligence and communication effectiveness for leadership preparedness in a multicultural environment. The present century is seeing accelerated transformation of businesses into truly global entities. As organizations operate in a boundary-less world, multicultural teams are the order of the day. Business leaders, who are able to understand, accept, and effectively respond to cultural differences are therefore in great demand.


10.28945/4524 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruti Gafni ◽  
Anat Goldstein

Aim/Purpose: [The full version of this paper is published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Lifelong Learning (IJELL) https://doi.org/10.28945/4617] The purpose of this study is to discover usage differences in task performance by students of different cultures, by examining procrastination patterns from a national cultural perspective, exploring the effect of multicultural virtual teamwork on student’s individual procrastination. Background: This study aims to examine higher-education entrepreneurial learning in the con-text of multicultural virtual teamwork, as actually performed during participation on a Global Entrepreneurship course. Methodology: In the examined course, there were 177 participants, from 3 different countries: United Kingdom, France and Israel. The students were grouped into 40 multicul-tural virtual (not face-to-face) teams, each one composed of at least participants of two countries. This research is based on analysis of objective data collected by Moodle, the LMS used in the In2It project, in its built-in log system, from the Global Entrepreneurship course website, which offer students diverse entities of information and tasks. The primary methodology of this study is analytics of the extracted data. Contribution: This study aims to discover the effects of multicultural teamwork on individual procrastination, while comparing the differences between cultures, as there are only a few studies exploring this relation. The uniqueness of this study is also by using and analyzing actual data of student procrastination from logs, while other studies of procrastination in multicultural student teams have measured perceived procrastination, collected using surveys. Findings: Results show statistical differences between countries in procrastination of individual assignments before team working: students from UK were the most procrastinators and Israeli students were the least procrastinators, but almost all students procrastinated. However, the outcome of the teamwork was submitted almost without procrastination. Moreover, procrastination in individual assignments performed after finishing the multicultural teamwork, dramatically decreased to 10% of the students' prior individual procrastination. Recommendations for Practitioners: The results from this study, namely, the decline of the procrastination after the multicultural virtual teamwork, can be used by global firms with employees all over the world, working in virtual multicultural teams. Such firms do not need to avoid multicultural teams, working virtually, as they can benefit from this kind of collaboration. Recommendation for Researchers: These results can be also beneficial for academic researchers from different cultures and countries, working together in virtual multicultural teams. Impact on Society: Understanding the positive effect of virtual multicultural teamwork, in mitigating the negative tendency of students from diverse cultures to procrastinate, as concluded in this study, can provide a useful tool for higher education or businesses to mitigate procrastination in teamwork processes. It can also be used as an experiential learning tool for improving task performance and teamwork process. Future Research: The relation between procrastination and motivation should be further examined in relation to multicultural virtual teams. Further research is needed to explore the effect of multicultural virtual teamwork during the teamwork process, and the reasoning for this effect.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-81
Author(s):  
Miroslav Jurásek ◽  
Tomislav Potocký

AbstractObjective: This article deals with the effective functioning of an organization in the international context. It focuses on the two key aspects of the communication in this respects: cultural intelligence (CQ), the capacity to operate successfully in the multicultural setting, and the quality of internal communication; it is investigated whether CQ (and its components: metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural) are rather related to the number of foreign languages or the language proficiency a person (or an employee) knows (has).Methodology: The sample of 132 undergraduate students of the English and Czech study programs at one private business university in the Czech Republic was used. The Spearman correlation coefficient, Chi–Square test for independence and the one–way ANOVA test (all of them conducted in the statistical program IBM SPSS Statistics 21) are calculated in the paper.Findings: CQ depends on the quality (the level of proficiency) rather than the quantity (the number) of foreign language skills. This conclusion applies regardless of gender: our data did not confirm that language skills were gender-dependent.Value Added: Recently a very fashionable cultural intelligence (CQ) construct has been explored in relation to a variety of variables and outputs. Nevertheless, insufficient attention has been given to the relationship between cultural intelligence and language competence so far; moreover, the research has brought contradictory results up to now. This study fills the actual knowledge gap.Recommendations: It is shown that in terms of the effective functioning in a culturally unknown environment and with a restricted time to learn foreign languages, it is preferable to develop continuously one´s skills in lingua franca than parallel and more superficial studies of several languages.


10.28945/4617 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 043-063
Author(s):  
Ruti Gafni ◽  
Anat Goldstein

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of this study is to discover usage differences in task performance by students of different cultures, by examining procrastination patterns from a national cultural perspective and exploring the effect of multicultural virtual teamwork on students’ individual procrastination. Background: This study aims to examine higher-education entrepreneurial learning in the context of multicultural virtual teamwork, as performed during participation on a Global Entrepreneurship course. Methodology: The methodology consists of quantitative comparative data analytics preceding and subsequent to intercultural team activities. This research is based on analyses of objective data collected by Moodle, the LMS used in the In2It project, in its built-in log system from the Global Entrepreneurship course website, which offers students diverse entities of information and tasks. In the examined course, there were 177 participants, from three different countries: United Kingdom, France and Israel. The students were grouped into 40 multicultural virtual (not face-to-face) teams, each one comprised of participants from at least two countries. The primary methodology of this study is analytics of the extracted data, which was transferred into Excel for cleaning purposes and then to SPSS for analysis. Contribution: This study aims to discover the effects of multicultural teamwork on individual procrastination while comparing the differences between cultures, as there are only a few studies exploring this relation. The uniqueness of this study is using and analyzing actual data of student procrastination from logs, whereas other studies of procrastination in multicultural student teams have measured perceived procrastination, collected using surveys. Findings: The results show statistical differences between countries in procrastination of individual assignments before team working: students from UK were the most procrastinators and Israeli students were the least procrastinators, but almost all students procrastinated. However, the outcome of the teamwork was submitted almost without procrastination. Moreover, procrastination in individual assignments performed after finishing the multicultural teamwork dramatically decreased to 10% of the students’ prior individual procrastination. Recommendations for Practitioners: The results from this study, namely, the decline of the procrastination after the multicultural virtual teamwork, can be used by global firms with employees all over the world, working in virtual multicultural teams. Such firms do not need to avoid multicultural teams, working virtually, as they can benefit from this kind of collaboration. Recommendation for Researchers: These results can be also beneficial for academic researchers from different cultures and countries, working together in virtual multicultural teams. Impact on Society: Understanding the positive effect of virtual multicultural teamwork, in mitigating the negative tendency of students from diverse cultures to procrastinate, as concluded in this study, can provide a useful tool for higher education or businesses to mitigate procrastination in teamwork processes. It can also be used as an experiential learning tool for improving task performance and teamwork process. Future Research: The relation between procrastination and motivation should be further examined in relation to multicultural virtual teams. Further research is needed to explore the effect of multicultural virtual teamwork during the teamwork process, and the reasoning for this effect.


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (13) ◽  
pp. 6482-6490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef Faller ◽  
Jennifer Cummings ◽  
Sameer Saproo ◽  
Paul Sajda

Our state of arousal can significantly affect our ability to make optimal decisions, judgments, and actions in real-world dynamic environments. The Yerkes–Dodson law, which posits an inverse-U relationship between arousal and task performance, suggests that there is a state of arousal that is optimal for behavioral performance in a given task. Here we show that we can use online neurofeedback to shift an individual’s arousal from the right side of the Yerkes–Dodson curve to the left toward a state of improved performance. Specifically, we use a brain–computer interface (BCI) that uses information in the EEG to generate a neurofeedback signal that dynamically adjusts an individual’s arousal state when they are engaged in a boundary-avoidance task (BAT). The BAT is a demanding sensory-motor task paradigm that we implement as an aerial navigation task in virtual reality and which creates cognitive conditions that escalate arousal and quickly results in task failure (e.g., missing or crashing into the boundary). We demonstrate that task performance, measured as time and distance over which the subject can navigate before failure, is significantly increased when veridical neurofeedback is provided. Simultaneous measurements of pupil dilation and heart-rate variability show that the neurofeedback indeed reduces arousal. Our work demonstrates a BCI system that uses online neurofeedback to shift arousal state and increase task performance in accordance with the Yerkes–Dodson law.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeevan Jyoti ◽  
Sumeet Kour

Purpose – Organizations in India are multicultural in nature. In this context, cultural intelligence is a tool, which can increase an individual’s ability to interact with people outside his/her culture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of cultural intelligence on task performance as well as to investigate the mediating role of cultural adjustment between the two. Design/methodology/approach – Extensive review of literature was done to acknowledge the cultural intelligence and task performance concept. Data for the study has been collected from the 225 managers working in nationalized banks in Jammu province (J&K, India). Data collected has been validated using confirmatory factor analysis and hypotheses have been tested through structural equation modeling. Findings – The study reveals that cultural intelligence significantly contributes toward task performance. The findings further reveal full mediation of cultural adjustment between cultural intelligence and task performance. Research limitations/implications – The study has been conducted in Indian cultural context, which can be extended to other Asian countries. Further, more outcomes of cultural intelligence can be taken into consideration in future for better understanding of the concept. Practical implications – The study contributes toward cultural intelligence theory. Organization should provide cultural training to the managers before sending them to out of home state assignment, which helps to understand the culture of that state and effectively interact with people belonging to that place. Originality/value – The paper empirically identifies the relationship between cultural intelligence and task performance in Indian context. Further, this relationship has been explored by using cultural adjustment as a mediator between the two. The model developed can be used for future research keeping it as a base.


2022 ◽  
pp. 858-876
Author(s):  
Çağlar Doğru

In this chapter, cultural intelligence, one of the most crucial capabilities of employees for overcoming the cultural obstacles of different countries, is figured out in depth. This is attained by checking out the relationships between cultural intelligence, job burnout and task performance of expatriates who are employees sent by their company to a host country for a period. Since expatriates are the employees who face actual barriers in adapting and living in different cultures, a quantitative research was conducted among 156 expatriates working at the marketing department of different multinational companies, operating in Turkey. According to the results, expatriates with high cultural intelligence face burnout less at the workplace. Moreover, task performance of these employees tends to increase because of their cultural intelligence. Consequently, with the help of this chapter, a paramount empirical study on cultural intelligence and its correlates is added to the literature.


Author(s):  
Çağlar Doğru

In this chapter, cultural intelligence, one of the most crucial capabilities of employees for overcoming the cultural obstacles of different countries, is figured out in depth. This is attained by checking out the relationships between cultural intelligence, job burnout and task performance of expatriates who are employees sent by their company to a host country for a period. Since expatriates are the employees who face actual barriers in adapting and living in different cultures, a quantitative research was conducted among 156 expatriates working at the marketing department of different multinational companies, operating in Turkey. According to the results, expatriates with high cultural intelligence face burnout less at the workplace. Moreover, task performance of these employees tends to increase because of their cultural intelligence. Consequently, with the help of this chapter, a paramount empirical study on cultural intelligence and its correlates is added to the literature.


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