The Relationship between Cultural Intelligence and Transformational Leadership Among Managers

Contemporary managers in the Twenty-first Century must lead employees from all cultures and backgrounds in Fortune 500 companies. The problem investigated in this study was that not all managers in American Fortune 500 companies are aware of, or sensitive to all cultures, which may have a negative impact upon the integration of large-scale business. In order for managers in American corporations to embrace this problem, it was necessary to build their knowledge of cultures while transforming themselves, fostering a new cultural awareness. The purpose of this quantitative method of inquiry was to determine if there is first a correlation or relationship between cultural intelligence (CI) and transformational leadership (TL) attributes of managers at American Fortune 500 companies and secondly, what effect the interaction of these abilities has upon these managers. Manager competence is missing a cultural component, whereas behaviors or actions must include foreign-understandings and adjustments of behavior during business activities. Participates in this study were a random sample of 265 people was drawn from the managers of the Fortune 500 Company located throughout both coasts of the United States. All abstractions of cultural intelligence were evaluated and reported upon in this research study. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant positive relationship between the CI behaviors and the TL abilities of managers, B = .86, t(259) = 5.51, p < .05. Additionally, there was a statistically non-significant positive relationship between the cultural intelligence cognitive and the transformational leadership abilities of managers. After comparing the TL management responses with the responses from the CI Quotient Scale, CQS, and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, MLQ, it was revealed that managers and leaders need to strengthen their cultural intelligence. The conclusion drawn from this study was that the findings provide new information to what is known about contemporary management theory of cultures when CI and TL constructs are compared. Further was the credibility of the findings since this investigation involved actual managers within actual work settings. It is recommended that American Fortune 500 managers continue to extinguish culture-specific biases through educational and workplace integrations.