Cultural Intelligence: A Dynamic and Interactional Framework

Cultural Intelligence (CQ) scholars’ continuing reliance on static geo-ethnic (mostly national) conceptualizations of culture raises three dilemmas: (1) the practical challenge of managers having to adapt to as many national cultures as they encounter, (2) a superficial understanding of how cultural intelligence manifests itself in everyday life, and (3) the inability to elaborate upon the nature (transient versus profound) of and potential pathways for cultural adaptations. There is, therefore, an urgent need to liberate the CQ discourse from geo-ethnic confines a need which is met in our present article through the introduction of transactional anthropology-based Douglasian Cultural Framework (DCF). The DCF conceptualizes human behavior as grounded in social transactions as opposed to geo-ethnic affiliations. According to this framework, the ongoing interactions between an individual’s preferences on two social dimensions (grid and group) and social context results in the emergence of four worldviews. Integrating these four worldviews of DCF with the four dimensions of CQ (motivational, cognitive, metacognitive, and behavioral) results in an innovative DCF-based CQ framework. This framework not only refrains from constraining the CQ discourse to geo-ethnic confines but also satisfactorily resolves the three dilemmas emerging from conventional CQ literature. Thus, our article contributes toward enriching extant CQ and DCF literatures and simultaneously combines insights from anthropology and psychology, but it also recognizes this is one small step in the right direction and calls for efforts toward generating other geo-ethnicity-free cultural frameworks that will further enrich our understanding of CQ.