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Raising Your Cultural Intelligence: Improve Expatriate Satisfaction for Your Workforce Abroad, with Michele Gelfand, Cultural Psychologist and Author, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
Build cross-cultural competence
It’s really interesting when we send people abroad. We often choose them based on their technical competence: we think they’re smart and they’re really successful at what they did. We don’t tend to choose people based on their cultural intelligence. We don’t tend to choose them based on their personal fit with another culture. And so as a result, a lot of times, we produce a lot of expatriate dissatisfaction when people go abroad; early return costs thousands – if not millions of dollars – the literature has estimated for these poor assignments.
Training is really important. Before people go abroad, they should learn about the level of norm strength (“tight” and “loose”) that they’re going to be encountering. Even selection matters. In a recent study, we found that it’s harder to adjust in tight cultures when people are sojourning to tight cultures. But if you have certain personality characteristics that are aligned with those contexts, people who have a tighter mindset in terms of personality do much better. They do far better in those contexts than people with loose mindsets. So you can think about it as, which people fit the culture better?
It’s critical, whenever we’re sending people abroad – and that’s including in the military where we’re really dealing with life or death circumstances – that they understand cultural differences. And not just that – that they understand where they come from. We start to understand that these differences evolve for good reason. If I accidentally was born in New York…but what if I was born in Singapore where there’s a high population density, 20,000 people per square mile? It’s almost like metaphorically living in an elevator a lot of your life. There’s so many people around you. You need rules there. We would want rules if we lived in this kind of context. Once we empathize with why these differences tend to evolve, it makes it a lot easier to be less judgmental when we’re on these international assignments.
Conduct a CQ assessment
It’s really critical that we try to create context that people can build their cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence – it’s more than just knowledge about other cultures. That’s certainly part of it; there’s one dimension that’s clearly just about knowledge of the culture. But it’s also about your motivation to interact with people in different cultures. That’s actually one of the most important parts of cultural intelligence is having that kind of openness to see diversity as opportunity versus a threat. That predicts people doing much better when they’re crossing cultures. And there’s also a sense of metacognition, which is a fancy way of saying, thinking about what you know about culture, questioning what you know about it. So there’s multiple dimensions of cultural intelligence and we can assess it. We can measure it and we can use it to predict how well people will do.
Prepare for local power dynamics
A general principle about “tight” and “loose” is that groups that have more power live in looser worlds. They have more latitude. And groups that have less power – women, minorities, other identities that are stigmatized – they live in tighter worlds. They’re subject to stronger punishments for the same exact behavior. And we’ve shown this with some research actually, that women and minorities get penalized much more severely for the same behaviors. You can see other evidence of it all the time. You saw it in the U.S. Open with Serena Williams, who argued that these refs would never call the same kinds of punishments and penalties on a white male tennis player. And so I think it’s also important to train them to think about the worlds they’re living in, to think about how they themselves, going out in the world, are going to be subject to the strength of norms and to try to think about how to negotiate that.
Prevent ethnocentric attitudes
It’s really important to get people to have a more realistic view into people’s lives, because when we’re in our own echo chambers, we tend to basically see people in extreme ways – that we don’t see the similarity that we have with them. And in one study that we recently did in the U.S. and Pakistan, we found that in the beginning when we interviewed people, they had very extreme stereotypes of each other. People in Pakistan thought that Americans were not just loose, but extremely loose, like walking around half-naked all the time or calling the police on their parents for not having enough freedom. On the flip side, Americans saw Pakistanis as not just tight, but extremely tight. And they didn’t associate them with singing or playing sports.
And what we did is a very simple intervention. It’s called the “daily diary intervention” that we developed. And we simply gathered diaries from American students in the U.S. and Pakistan. We randomly assigned people in Pakistan and the U.S. to read each other’s diaries for seven days. And these were unedited diaries, so in the American context some of these kids were waking up with their girlfriends or they were going out partying. In the Pakistan context, again, they were at the mosques more. But what we found was fascinating. Over the course of the study, they started to see the other in terms of their human – that they were human beings. They saw the similarities that they shared with each other in terms of their anxieties or their studies. The Pakistanis at the end of the study – they had much more positive attitudes towards Americans. And they said, “Yeah, it’s looser than here, but they’re far more respectful of their parents, and they’re far different than we expected.” And the flip side too with Americans: they saw Pakistanis as being tighter, but they saw so much similarity. And we really were able to reduce the cultural distance, in this case, just through reading people’s daily diaries.