Cultural Intelligence and the Global Mindset

With the globalization of business, a relevant question is how might people deal with others from fundamentally different backgrounds (cultural, ethnic, functional, etc.)? Many authors (Rhinesmith, 1992; Paul, 2000; Gupta & Govindarajan, 2002; Kefalas, 1998, just to mention a few) suggest that managers working in international contexts require a specialized way of thinking about the environment in which they operate, a so-called “global mindset.” In the current chapter, we discuss the evolving notion of a “global mindset” and contrast it with extant work on the related concept of “cultural intelligence” (Earley, 2002; Earley & Ang, 2003; Earley & Mosakowski, 2004; Thomas & Inkson, 2004).