What is cultural agility you ask - Essay Example

Cultural agility response At this day and age, cultural agility is already a given if one wants to advance in an organization. The world is alreadyglobalized that it is now necessary to interact with people from different cultural perspective. These people are myriad in an organization and they can come as consultants, suppliers, co-workers, stakeholders, etch. The bottom line is, cultural agility is now an unwritten requirement for any job in a corporate set up. This is more important if one is holding a managerial position or one that interacts with various departments and agencies because along the way, someone will surely come from a different cultural background.

Universities and learning institutions are now cognizant of the importance of cultural agility towards professionals. This explains why MBA programmes boasts of its diversity initiative in training its future managers realizing that to be successful in a globalized economy, one has to be adept in adapting to culture that is not his or her own. Adapting requires deeper understanding of other culture and to be able to interact effectively without being sidetracked by cultural differences. Individuals and professionals have to make an initiative also to improve their cultural agility in addition to their regular skill sets.

In fact, they should now treat cultural agility as one of the necessary skill sets in an organization. Caligiuri was right that cultural agility involves cross-cultural competency that cultural agility is “the ability to navigate global challenges facing an organization. Cultural agility is for training and development professionals with various needs across the globe, including but not limited to different countries legal, educational, labor practices, economic system, traditions, values, beliefs, and or other differences affecting the organization”.

But what was lacking in his study was the assertion that in today’s integrated economy, cross-cultural competency is not just one of those “enhancements” of one’s skills but now a professional necessity. To prove this, there is no business organization in America or somewhere else big or small where it does not interact with anything foreign because somewhere along the line of the operation of their business, they may need to interact with foreign suppliers, co-workers, and above all, customers who have different cultural orientation of which the organization cannot afford to make a mistake otherwise it will lose the business of such customer.

It would be unthinkable for a business organization to remain insensitive or ignorant about cross cultural competency because for sure, it will be left behind or die into oblivion in a globalized environment where its rules mandate a closer interaction among its players (and even competitors). Cultural agility has business implications too and those organizations who lacks cross cultural competency paid high prices for their failure. The classic example of this is Pretzel Time who is very successful in the US market but failed in China.

Its failure is due to its lack cultural agility to adapt to the Chinese market when it insisted its white tile decor to be used in the Chinese market thinking that since it is a pleasant décor to its parent country in the USA, then the Chinese must also think the same. This proved to be costly for Pretzel Time because the white tile décor reminds the Chinese market of bathroom causing the company to fail in the Chinese market.