The Difference Between Cultural Intelligence and Cultural Agility
In today's global world, it's more important than ever to understand and work well with people from different cultures. Two key skills that help with this are cultural intelligence (CQ) and cultural agility. Although they are related, they are not the same. Knowing the difference between them can help you succeed in a multicultural environment.
Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is about understanding and adapting to different cultural settings. It's made up of four main parts:
Motivational CQ: This is about having the interest and confidence to interact with people from different cultures.
Cognitive CQ: This involves knowing about other cultures, including their norms, practices, and conventions.
Metacognitive CQ: This is the awareness and control of your own cultural knowledge and thinking processes.
Behavioral CQ: This is the ability to change your behavior to fit different cultural settings.
David Thomas and his colleagues describe CQ as the ability to adapt effectively to new cultural environments. It means understanding cultural differences and acting in a way that fits those differences.
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Cultural agility is about being able to work well and comfortably in different cultural environments. It involves the ability to understand the situation and respond in one of the three ways:
Cultural Adaptation: Changing your behavior to fit the cultural context you are in.
Cultural Minimization: Recognizing cultural differences but maintaining your own way of doing things, which can be important for keeping organizational standards or personal values.
Cultural Integration: Combining different cultural norms to create new, innovative solutions.
Cultural agility is especially useful for people who often interact with different cultures, like in international business. It helps you respond effectively to various cultural situations. People with cultural agility possess cultural agility competencies (tolerance of ambiguity, resilience, humility perspective-taking, relationship building, and curiosity). These can be assessed and developed through Skiilify’s myGiide.
Two Key Differences
The role of adaptation: While CQ focuses on understanding and adapting to cultural differences, cultural agility includes adaptation as one of three possible responses. A culturally agile person can choose to adapt, minimize, or integrate cultural differences depending on the situation. This flexibility is crucial for managing diverse cultural contexts effectively.
The way they are developed: Another difference is whether the competence can be developed outside a cultural situation. You can have cultural agility skills, like humility, resilience, and tolerance of ambiguity, even if you haven't experienced a new culture. These skills can develop without being in different cultural settings. However, CQ needs cross-cultural interactions for development and application.
CQ gives you the foundation of understanding and awareness, while cultural agility is about putting that understanding into practice. High CQ helps you recognize and understand cultural differences, which is essential for being culturally agile and choosing the right response.