Cultural Intelligence—Mediator, Moderator, and Higher Levels of Analysis

Research on cultural intelligence has not been limited to studies of antecedents or outcomes of cultural intelligence. The logic of considering cultural intelligence as a mediator or moderator variable is consistent with how other individual difference constructs are often envisioned. However, theory development in this regard has lacked any significant advancement in our thinking. When cultural intelligence has been proposed as a mediator, it typically simply linked the antecedents and outcomes that have been reviewed in the previous chapters. When cultural intelligence has been proposed as a moderator, most studies focused on its interactive effect with cultural diversity and leadership behaviors. The majority of theoretical and empirical work has been done at individual level, while some studies have taken the perspective of understanding the meaning and function of cultural intelligence at a higher level. Translating cultural intelligence from the individual level to higher levels of analysis is less straightforward than simply aggregating individual-level scores and may mean conceptualizing cultural intelligence in a completely different way. In this chapter, we first review studies investigating cultural intelligence as a mediator or a moderator and then discuss the implications of cultural intelligence at higher—team and organizational levels of analysis.