Cultural Intelligence And Emotional Intelligence

1, Introduction

In the modern society, many organizations are multicultural. It is crucial that new generation of labor force should focus on improving some international social skills which directly affect their work performance. Some of those are cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence. Both of these have been an extremely popular topic for many researchers over the last few decades. Accordingly, there are many definitions which can cause the confusion for who want to learn about this fields. Beside trying to define the two terms, researchers also want to determine the relationship between these two and its effect to organization’s performance. This essay begins with comprehensive definition of both terms then bring them into consideration

It is related to complex set of characteristics and defined as “…the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth…” (as cited in Earley & Ang, 2003). Emotional intelligence help a person to understand and recognize one’s emotion which develop several specific skills to manage self and relationship with other. People who could understand their feeling will easily understand other people’s emotion.

Emotional intelligence have contributed to several stages of human psychology. In one 2003 study, they show that students with low emotional intelligence are related to higher consumption of alcohol and addiction drugs and caused more legal troubles (Tamannaeifar, M et al 2003). High emotional intelligence promotes student’s adjustment and show some positive behaviors like cooperation, responsibility, empathy and self-reliance (Tamannaeifar, M et al

Emotional and cultural intelligence have a special relationship. The one’s self-awareness and empathy in emotional intelligence influences the cognitive aspect in cultural intelligence. It assists one in understanding which behaviors are acceptable in unfamiliar culture by analyzing emotional gestures. They also have empathetic for differences of culture. The self-motivation will maintain the one’s inspiration in exploring new culture. They fully acknowledge the important role of adapting and adjusting new cultural setting. Accordingly, they are more willing to accept this as an joyful challenge and can give their best performance. The self-regulation is the result of cognitive and self-awareness. Because motivation for culture adaptation, one will adjust actions to suit the situation. One’s social skills and behaviors are based on self-regulation and self-awareness.. Only when one reaches the self-awareness, he/she can acknowledge the cultural cues in unfamiliar cultural environment. They will have the empathy and understanding for shortage or weird traditional custom which can be totally unlike their couture. It is clear that cultural intelligence requires some components of emotional one and vice