Cultural Intelligence and Intercultural Cooperation : The Moderating Effect of Cultural Perspective Taking and Metacognitive Cultural Intelligence

application/pdfCultural Intelligence（ CQ） is a relatively new concept that purports to measure an individual’s capacity to operate in intercultural situations. For organizations that wish to prepare their employees for expatriate assignments, or to train personnel for cross-cultural interactions in a domestic environment, CQ offers a quick solution to evaluate an employee’s readiness to work in these settings. An important aspect of cross-cultural management is cooperation among culturally diverse counterparts, and an important basis for establishing a healthy cooperative environment is trust. Studies have shown that trust can be enhanced by engaging in an explicit perspective-taking exercise （Williams, 2012）. However, these studies are rare in the cross-cultural management literature. This study explores the relationship between CQ and trust, and whether it is mediated by a cultural perspective taking intervention. The study was done by administering a survey to Japanese undergraduate university students（ n=73） in a global business management program. The method used to assess（ non-） cooperation was the likelihood to cooperate（ defect） in a prisoner’s dilemma. The instrument used to measure CQ was the CQ scale developed by Early and Ang（ 2003）. To evaluate the effectiveness of a perspective taking intervention, respondents were randomly separated into a control and treatment group. Results showed no statistically significant effect of a perspective taking intervention, and no correlation between cooperation and CQ. The results of this study suggest that CQ on its own may not be enough to predict cooperative behavior in a cross-cultural setting, and that a basic cultural perspective taking intervention will not have a significant influence on an individual’s cooperative behavior.departmental bulletin pape