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 ).