Ibs Critical Reflection Essay

Name   : TEE SIH CHING

        The components of cultural intelligence (CQ) compromise the key concept of mindfulness which integrates the other facets of cultural knowledge with culturally intelligent behavior. The concept of mindfulness is important to develop cultural intelligence because it helps an individual to be conscious of the difference between cultures, by not only realizing our own assumptions, ideas and emotion, but also be considering, adapting as well as accepting the views, words and behavior of other person. This concept was first originated in Buddhism as a core teaching of Gautama Buddha (Thich, 1999), then a social psychologist, Langer, was applied it into psychology literature (1989). And now, it has been to cross-cultural communication (Ting-Toomey, 1999). 

        An individual who holds the concept of mindfulness, who will positively accepts behavior and ideas that are very different from his/her own by perceiving the situation towards the perspective of their cultural background. It plays a central role for the teams or individuals working in cross cultural situation, so that it will higher the performance of the team by making control over lower level cognitive process and maintaining automatic behavior. This is how mindfulness as a key mediating  links cultural knowledge with effective behavior. Consider the following example:

In 2013, I was worked as a part-timer in a legal firm during semester break to gain working experience. One day, my boss, Ms Elizabeth assigned tasks for me which is urgently needed and expect me to complete it immediately on that day so that she is able to bring it to the signing session on the next day morning. The time that she assigned the tasks for me is around 5.30pm, but the end of the office working time is at 6pm. These tasks needed few hours to complete it. I realized that I'm not able to finish the tasks within 30 minutes especially without the assistance of my senior executive, who are already not in the office for outstation, because my senior executive never transfer the knowledge to manage these kind of tasks. Therefore, I look for help from other colleagues and senior executives from the other project team. We work together to identify the method to draft the document. Finally, we used up few hours to complete the task at around 12am on that day, however, overtime working is not paid according to the rules of the firm.

        To view on my position, I'm belong to collectivist culture in Hofstede's value dimension framework which are interdependent self that work well in group and always avoid a direct confrontation. Instead of saying 'no', a collectivist prefer to use expressions or phrase to demonstrate a disagreement or negative statement, because saying 'no' would destroy peace and harmony in the group. Therefore, I accept the tasks given without saying a 'no', although I know that I will be work overtime and the pay cannot be claimed. This is because this project team only has me and my senior, apart from my senior, there is no other people understand the project better than me. Regarding to this point, it showed that I emphasize on promoting selflessness and placing the community needs in front of individual needs. With this mindfulness thinking, I got more openness to new information. In addition, I'm also on a culture showing high power distance, as I expected to be told what to do and supervise by the superior.

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