Leadership revisited through Cultural Intelligence : The development of a key competence in professional context

During the last years, due to the globalization markets become more and more involved in an international level. Cultural diversity in the workplace is something common nowadays, it involves countless benefits for the companies and the other professional contexts. While simultaneously, it involves conflicts and misunderstandings therefore it is more and more required to get people able to deal with different cultures. The main purpose of our Thesis is to study the process through which an individual becomes able to deal and work with different cultures. In other words, we pretend to discover how someone can become culturally intelligent. This thesis has been conducted using the Grounded Theory method. By analyzing the data we have collected throughout eight interviews from different culturally intelligent people and the data we have obtained by reading literature, we came with the idea that the process for becoming culturally intelligent is composed by three elements: the first one is related with the individual, the second one is related with the interaction of the individual within a multicultural group and the third one is related with the benefits and disadvantages that emerged while someone is working with different cultures