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P. Christopher Earley, Soon Ang, and Joo-Seng Tan. CQ: Developing Cultural Intelligence at Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, 264 pages, $29.95.
Reviewed by Claude Lévy-Leboyer, Institut de Recherches et D'Applications en Psychologie du Travail, Paris, France.
Economic globalization is now a reality-it is a fact that no longer needs to be debated. It has a strong impact on management practices-managers must adapt to various social environments and cope with cultural differences among the people who work with them. "Cultural intelligence" is becoming an important quality for managers working in another country, in a multinational organization, or with a workforce whose culture is different from their own. This justifies the book's topical appeal. It was written by three authors working in Singapore. The first author is an American academic, presently dean of the National University of Singapore Business School. Earley is not a newcomer in the field, as he wrote with Erez, among many other publications, a book entitled Culture, Self-Identity and Work (1993), which deals with the role of cultural values as a linking pin among identity, work attitude, and behavior (Erez & Earley, 1993). The other two authors represent a culture that will differ from most of the book's readers, as they both live and work in Singapore, where they teach at the Nanyang Business School.
The book's interest to practitioners comes from the fact that it is not limited to a theoretical approach, as its main aim is to help managers developing a "cultural intelligence." The authors stress the difference between knowing about different cultures and adjusting one's behavior to adapt to a different culture. "Cultural intelligence" is therefore defined as "a person's capability for successful adaptation to new cultural settings, that is, for unfamiliar settings attributable to cultural context."
However, adjusting your behavior is only possible when you really understand the rules and values of the culture to which you are trying to adapt and when you are aware of the meaning of the new behavior. It...