Effective cross-cultural communication is achieved by cultural intelligence. Which is the natural ability to interpret someone’s unfamiliar and ambiguous gestures in just the way that person’s compatriots and colleagues would, even to mirror them. Cross-cultural communication is the ability to communicate in the society or work environment effectively regardless of the different cultural background, norms and values. In cross-cultural communication, the propensity of one’s judgment is suspended, and he is able to think objectively before acting. It involves using one’s senses to register all the ways that the personalities interacting in front of them are different from those in his home culture yet similar to one another.
Three components of cultural intelligence help us in achieving good cross-cultural communication. These are;
The Cognitive: Which is the use of the head, which can be improved through root learning about the beliefs, customs and taboos of foreign cultures.
The Physical: This is the use of the body; this is where cross-communication is mirrored through actions and body languages.
The Emotional: Which is the use of the heart, which involves the belief in one’s efficacy in understanding other people’s culture.
This could be applied to the workplace by a proper understanding between separate teams. For example, the salesperson working hand-in-hand with the operations team to achieve the common goal of the organization.
An example of the absence of this concept in the workplace is an organization that discriminates does not permit the women labor force because of their beliefs. For example, in Afghanistan, because of their religious beliefs, which is a major barrier to cross-cultural communication, women are not allowed to go through education or have a secular job.
An example of this in the workplace: Displaying good cultural intelligence when relating to the organization’s foreign investors but not just showing an understanding of their foreign culture but actually giving them the notion that you live in their world by talking about various cultural interests specific to them, making the right gestures, greeting according to their customs, etc.
Emotional intelligence refers to quality of combining intelligence and emotion to improve thinking.
One concept is the view of emotional intelligence as a general descriptive term referring to a hierarchy of mental abilities. Basic, discrete mental capacities are at the bottom of this hierarchy. These include, for example, the ability to recognize words and their meanings in the verbal realm, or, in the perceptual level, to see how puzzle pieces go together, or to comprehend how things are rotated in space. Broader, more cohesive groups of abilities are found in the middle of the hierarchy. These abilities include verbal-comprehension intelligence, which is concerned with understanding and reasoning about verbal information, and perceptual-organizational intelligence, which is concerned with recognizing, comparing, and comprehending perceptual patterns. General intelligence, or g, is the highest level of the hierarchy and encompasses abstract reasoning across all such areas.
An example of the absence of this in the workplace will be when an auditor refuses to make a quality review of his work before giving a final opinion due to the friendly nature of his client.
An example of the presence of this in the workplace would be when an auditor of a company does his due diligence on a client before accepting the audit engagement regardless of the gifts and hospitality gotten from such client in the past.
