Cultural intelligence in multicultural teams : a systematic literature review

Abstract

Since the number of cross-cultural encounters in the modern working society is growing. It has become important to knowledge one’s own course of action in multicultural environment. People who work naturally well in cross-cultural situations are called culturally intelligent. These people can rapidly change their behavior and adapt to the multicultural environment. This capability is called cultural intelligence (CQ). Cultural intelligence becomes especially important when people from varying cultural backgrounds work together in teams.

This study takes a review on research made on cultural intelligence in multicultural teams. This study is conducted by using systematic literature review consisting of 17 research articles which were collected from four different academic databases. The aim of this review is to analyse and describe the research made on this subject, to have a clear overview. This will benefit future researchers to know which viewpoints and issues should be addressed to advance the research on cultural intelligence in multicultural teams.

The results of this systematic literature review show that the main viewpoints of papers that studied cultural intelligence in multicultural teams were from the team members’ perspective, constructed by surveys and or questionnaires and the results show that cultural intelligence has a positive impact on multicultural teams’ performance. In addition, some of the studies were focusing on how cultural intelligence can be affected by multicultural teamwork. These results also show that multicultural teamwork has a positive impact on the development of cultural intelligence. The main theory these findings were based on was Earley & Ang’s (2003) Cultural Intelligence theory. Additionally, the methods used were based on their Cultural Intelligence Scale.

Based on the results, one can see that the research made to this day on cultural intelligence in multicultural teams shows that cultural intelligence does have a positive effect on multicultural teams’ performance. In addition to this, cultural intelligence grows when working in cross-cultural environments.

Based on this systematic literature review the future viewpoints for studying cultural intelligence in multicultural teams should focus on replicating the existing studies and finding new alternative ways of measuring cultural intelligence.