D082 Task 2 Values and Cultural Intelligence Reflection

Direct, Fair, Dependable and Curious: Four Core Values and How Cultural Intelligence Shapes the Way an Assistant Store Manager Lives Them With a Team From Six Countries

Student Name

School of Business, Western Governors University

D082: Emotional and Cultural Intelligence, Task 2

Course Instructor

Month Day, Year

Direct, Fair, Dependable and Curious: Four Core Values and How Cultural Intelligence Shapes the Way an Assistant Store Manager Lives Them With a Team From Six Countries

Introduction

At the composite home improvement store where I work as an assistant manager, my front-end team of 26 includes employees born in the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Ukraine. The team's diversity is a strength: customers are often served in their own language, and employees bring different ideas about service. It also means that the way I express my values can land differently with different people. This reflection explains my four core values, why they matter to me, how they show up in my behavior and how cultural intelligence helps me live them with a diverse team.

Cultural Intelligence

Cultural intelligence refers to how well a person works and relates to others when cultures differ. Researchers commonly break it into four parts: metacognitive, awareness and planning during cross-cultural interactions; cognitive, knowledge of cultural norms; motivational, interest and confidence in working across cultures; and behavioral, skill at changing how one speaks and acts to suit the setting (Ang et al., 2007). Earley and Mosakowski (2004) argued that cultural intelligence differs from emotional intelligence because it requires understanding behavior that is shaped by a culture one does not share, and that it can be developed through deliberate attention to the head, the body and the heart: learning, adjusting behavior and building confidence.

Value One: Directness

I value directness because I grew up in a family where problems were talked about openly, and I have seen how unspoken problems grow. In my behavior, directness means telling employees clearly what I need and giving honest feedback. But research on national cultures shows wide differences in how directly negative feedback is given and received (Meyer, 2014). For some of my employees, blunt criticism, even in private, can feel like a loss of respect. Cultural intelligence helps me keep the value while adjusting its expression. With employees who come from more indirect communication cultures, I begin feedback by recognizing what is going well, frame problems as questions, such as "What made the returns line slow today?", and give time for a response. The message stays honest; the delivery changes.

Value Two: Fairness

Fairness matters to me because early in my career I worked for a manager who played favorites, and I saw how quickly it destroyed a team's trust. I show fairness by rotating desirable and undesirable shifts, applying rules the same way to everyone and explaining my decisions. Cultural intelligence adds nuance: fairness can mean treating everyone the same, but it can also mean giving people what they need to succeed. For an employee still learning English, fairness means giving written instructions in addition to verbal ones and checking understanding, not simply holding everyone to identical communication expectations. Research on culture also shows differences in how people view hierarchy (Hofstede et al., 2010); some employees may be reluctant to raise concerns with a manager, so I ask for input directly and privately rather than waiting for complaints.

Value Three: Dependability

I value dependability because the people who have helped me most were the ones who did what they said they would. For me, it means keeping promises about schedules, following up on requests and being on time. Cultural intelligence reminds me that attitudes toward time and schedules vary across cultures and individuals, and that an employee who arrives a few minutes late is not necessarily careless. I hold everyone to the store's attendance standards, which exist for good reasons, but I explain why punctuality matters in retail, where customers are waiting, rather than assuming everyone already shares my view.

Value Four: Curiosity

Curiosity is the value that makes the others work across cultures. I value it because every time I have asked someone about their background or their way of doing things, I have learned something useful. In behavior, it means asking questions before judging: when a Vietnamese cashier was quiet in team meetings, I asked her privately how she preferred to share ideas, and learned she was uncomfortable disagreeing publicly but had several good suggestions. Curiosity drives the motivational and metacognitive parts of cultural intelligence, the interest in other cultures and the habit of reflecting on one's own assumptions.

Where My Values Conflict

My values sometimes pull against each other, and cultural differences can sharpen the conflict. Directness and fairness collided last spring when a longtime cashier from Ukraine told me, bluntly and in front of others, that the new schedule was unfair to people with children. My first instinct, shaped by my own value of directness, was to respond just as bluntly. Instead, I recognized that her directness, common in her culture and in mine, was not disrespect, and that her point about fairness deserved a real answer. We talked privately, I explained how the schedule was built, and I changed the rotation so that parents could request two fixed evenings. The experience taught me that cultural intelligence is not only about adapting to people who are less direct than I am; it also means recognizing when someone else's style matches mine and not taking offense at the very behavior I value in myself. Curiosity helped most: asking what she needed turned a confrontation into a better schedule for the whole team.

Leading the Team With These Values

Together, these values shape how I lead. I will hold short one-on-one conversations with each team member every month, using curiosity to learn how they prefer to receive feedback and share ideas. I will provide key information in writing and, where possible, in employees' first languages. I will invite ideas in more than one way, in meetings, privately and in writing, so that employees who are uncomfortable speaking up can still contribute. And I will reflect weekly on interactions that went poorly, asking whether a cultural difference, not bad intent, might explain them.

Conclusion

Directness, fairness, dependability and curiosity guide how I manage, and they come from experiences that shaped me. Leading a team from six countries has taught me that values are constant but their expression must adapt. Cultural intelligence, knowing about cultural differences, reflecting on my own assumptions, wanting to learn and adjusting my behavior, lets me stay true to my values while treating every employee with respect.

References

Ang, S., Van Dyne, L., Koh, C., Ng, K. Y., Templer, K. J., Tay, C., & Chandrasekar, N. A. (2007). Cultural intelligence: Its measurement and effects on cultural judgment and decision making, cultural adaptation and task performance. Management and Organization Review, 3(3), 335-371. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-8784.2007.00082.x

Earley, P. C., & Mosakowski, E. (2004). Cultural intelligence. Harvard Business Review, 82(10), 139-146.

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Meyer, E. (2014). The culture map: Breaking through the invisible boundaries of global business. PublicAffairs.