Cultural Intelligence for IT Workers
November 4, 2007 by Raj Sheelvant
What is Cultural Intelligence? Cultural Intelligence or Cultural Quotient (CQ) is a theory within Organization Psychology and Management that is focused on understanding the impact of individual behavior in the context of his/her national culture. To be globally competitive, an IT Worker needs to acquire knowledge and skills to understand unique culture of diverse individuals in the context of region, religion, ethnicity and country.
As the barriers for globalization continue to go down and as firms try to diversify and expand where the labor is, the IT projects now are more complex than ever before. IT projects no longer belong to a region or a country. It is owned by multiple groups spanning across the globe. An IT Worker is expected to collaborate with the other IT Workers dispersed across the globe. Under these circumstances, an IT worker needs to build new dimension of collaborating with different people of different cultural orientation and different level of comfort with English language.
Geert Hofstede is an expert Dutch researcher who has documented on the interactions between national cultures and organization cultures has built the framework for assessing global culture. He has divided the culture into 5 dimensions:
- Power Distance Index
- Individualism
- Masculinity
- Uncertainty Avoidance Index
- Long-Term Orientation.
Each country or a region has a culture that is different in one or more dimensions. IT worker needs a clear understanding of Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions to implement ways to improve collaboration of the globally diverse labor. For ex: If you compare the countries US and France, you will see that the Uncertainty Avoidance Index is high for the French culture and low for the US culture. IT workers in these countries will react to solving a ‘complex’ programming problem in a diametrically opposite ways. US IT Workers (with low Uncertainty Avoidance Index) would want to tackle the problem upfront and is willing to take risk of failure but a French IT Worker (with high Uncertainty Avoidance Index) would want to brainstorm and research to see if there are different and efficient ways to solve the problem. Without the Hofstede’s framework, from a French perspective, a US IT worker appear ‘cowboy’ish in his approach and from the US IT Worker perspective, a French IT worker will appear to be ’stalling’ the work - thus reinforcing the typical cultural stereotype. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are a powerful framework to go beyond the stereotypes and look at ways to take advantage of their natural cultural predisposition.
Though English is the lingua franca of the global IT development, people in different regions have differing level of comfort with English language. Every region in the world has ‘localized’ English accent as well as use of words that radically alter the meaning. For example: ‘a deadly issue’ for an American is an issue resulting in the death of people involved. It’s far less ‘severe’ to an Indian. Hence an ability to go beyond grammer and language and dive deeper to get the right information will also become an important skill for the IT worker.
The role of IT worker has evolved over the past decade. Initially, the job was insular. The IT worker could be easily stereotyped as an incompetent communicator. Now, due to increase in complexity, ‘soft’ skills like good communication skills, collaboration skills are becoming more important. An IT worker with higher CQ will not only be more valuable to the firm but also will have a higher chance of employability.
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