Conceptual Review on Cultural Intelligence

In a highly globalized business environment of organization, doing business which is profitable involves crossing the boundaries which is cross cultural business and extending the business internationally become an important element for all types of organization. It can range from small scale business to large organization. This leads to a broad array of global leaders and individuals to find better jobs in abroad. This global leaders formed by globalized business milieu should have the expertise, capability and knowledge to cope with the people of diverse environment. Although there is lot of opportunities created by the globalization, equally there are challenges exposing organizational level as well as at individual level. The challenges were cultural diversity and people from different cultures are likely to behave and interact optimally in a heterogeneous cultural scenario. Some individuals function better compared to others which leads to a question “why some persons perform more efficiently compared to others in a different cultural background.” This leads to the concept of cultural intelligence developed by Earley & Ang (2003). This paper mainly reviews the concept of cultural intelligence by providing an insight on the definition and dimension of cultural intelligence. Also it examines and provides an overview of the factor affecting, potential outcomes of cultural intelligence and scale used for measuring the cultural intelligence. Through review of literature, it facilitates the body of insights especially in the area of cross cultural research both in academic level and managerial level. Also it encourage the individual and global leaders to perform effectively in cross cultural circumstances