Cultural Intelligence (CQ) : Framing the Effectiveness of Leader-Follower Relationship

Abstract: Since the world moved into the 21st century and we are competing in a global marketplace, a growing number of organizations have become multinational. Leadership today is a multicultural challenge. Thus, the organizational context requires leaders who are capable of managing the diversity of employees. The globalized world requires leaders with high cultural intelligence (CQ) to boost relationships with their followers while implementing leadership projects and programs. Therefore, cultural intelligence (CQ) competencies have become a more demanding capability for both leaders and followers. This thesis aims to investigate how cultural intelligence (CQ) becomes an influencing factor in fostering the effectiveness of a leader-follower relationship through mediating the role of organizational commitment, trust and mutual understating / conflict. So, as a starting point, we employ a conceptual research approach to build a conceptual model and to propose hypotheses that may help us explore our study. We suggest that leaders and followers with higher levels of cultural intelligence (CQ) can consciously influence the effectiveness of leaderfollower relationships while catalyzing and correlating the role of organizational commitment, trust and mutual understanding/conflict. Leaders’ and followers’ cultural intelligence (CQ) can thus positively build a relation with organizational commitment, trust and mutual understanding. The thesis does thereby contribute to an understanding of the theory of cultural intelligence (CQ) and its impact on the relationship between leaders and followers.