Cultural Intelligence as a Mediator of Relationships Between Openness to Experience and Adaptive Performance

Recent research demonstrates that the four factors of cultural intelligence (CQ) - Metacognition, cognition, behavior, and motivation - are strongly related to the personality trait referred to as openness to experience (Ang, Van Dyne, & Koh, 2006). In addition, significant links between CQ and criteria such as task performance, cultural decision making, well-being, and adjustment in expatriate samples suggest that CQ may have considerable utility in performance prediction (Ang, Van Dyne, Koh, Ng, Templer, Tay & Chandrasekar, 2007; Templer, Tay, & Chandrasekar, 2006). Yet while CQ has a keen following in management circles (Ang et al., 2006; Early & Ang, 2003; Peterson, 2004), it is almost unknown in the organizational psychology literature. A search of the psych-info and psych-article databases (September 2007) using the keywords cultural intelligence produced no journal articles on this construct. Although articles and books referred to related concepts, such as intercultural effectiveness (Leong, 2007), sociocultural adjustment (Wang & Takeuchi, 2007), cultural competence (Gong & Fan, 2006), and intercultural competence (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004), nowhere was CQ (as used in this study) referenced in the psychological literature. In contrast, the management journal Group and Organization Management has recently published an entire special edition focusing on CQ (Konrad, 2006). A recent review on cross-cultural organizational behavior attests that interest is clearly increasing in how culture impacts management and organizational behavior (Gelfand, Erez, & Aycan, 2007). We believe organizational psychologists may have paid little attention to CQ to date because its relationship to performance is relatively unexplored. This chapter attempts to address this deficiency by establishing the position of the CQ construct within the predictor-criterion network commonly studied by organizational psychologists, namely, the theory of job performance