What Makes People Abroad Satisfied? The Role of Cultural Intelligence, Cultural Identity, and Culture Shock
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
socscie-2141727
What makes people abroad satisfied? The role of cultural intelligence, cultural identity, and cultural shock.
This study examines relationships among cultural intelligence (CQ), cultural identity, cultural shock and life satisfaction in a sample of 194 predominantly international students studying at Czech universities. Results suggest that although CQ is significantly associated with both cultural identity (positively) and cultural shock (negatively), only cultural shock mediates the effects of CQ of students’ satisfaction with life.
I read this paper with great interest and was intrigued by the study’s aim to examine the joint effects of CQ, cultural identity, and cultural shock on life satisfaction. Our understanding of the interplay between cultural identities and CQ is still nascent, and your paper has the potential to make a meaningful contribution in this regard. Few studies have also examined culture shock as a more proximal mediator of psychological adjustment.
Below are my suggestions for strengthening the paper.
Conceptual
1. Strengthen motivation. The current introduction describes what you will do in the paper but does not motivate why it is important to study CQ, cultural identity, and cultural shock together. You could strengthen the introduction by making a clearer case for what puzzle your paper is trying to address – i.e., what do we currently know about the relationship of CQ and adjustment, what do we not know, and why that leaves our current understanding limited.
2. One concern relates to the role of cultural identity in your model. One’s cultural identity and CQ are both exogenous constructs (e.g., Lee et al., 2018; Lisak & Erez, 2015). In addition, one’s cultural identity may be even more stable than one’s CQ since the latter is conceptualized as a malleable, state-like construct (Ang et al., 2007). Thus, it is less clear why you would expect cultural identity to mediate CQ effects. Could you treat cultural identity as a control variable in your model to address this concern? Alternatively, you would need stronger theory to explain how CQ relates to cultural identity.
3. On p. 2, you review some individual studies of the effects of CQ. There have now been meta-analyses published on the outcomes of CQ (e.g., Schlaegel et al., 2021). You may wish to draw on these – and also review what they suggest for future research (as a way of strengthening your motivation as well).
4. In section 2.3, you review research on culture and cultural differences at length. These are only tangentially related to your research question. Could you cut down this review?
5. Your current conceptualization of cultural identity emphasizes shared values and attributes. Many conceptualizations of cultural identity also include an affective component – or an affective attachment to one’s cultural group (e.g., Arnett, 2002; Lee et al., 2018; Shokef & Erez, 2006). Could you embrace such a broader definition in your theorizing?
6. Your theorizing on cultural shock includes a strong temporal component. This suggests that time in the host country would be a central element for you to include in your research. Could you elaborate on this temporal dimension and how you expect CQ to play a role in this temporal process? Would it be that CQ dampens the magnitude of the cultural shock U-curve or would it compress the time needed to go through the full u-curve cycle? If you have the data, could you also test the role of time on the relationships in your model? If you do not have such data, consider discussing this as a limitation and future research opportunity.
7. Minor notes:
a. Avoid overly strong language, such as “It has been proven that cultural intelligence is a positive predictor…” An alternative way to phrase this would be “Research has found that cultural intelligence predicts …”
b. Hypothesis 2 is worded awkwardly. Saying that “cultural shock negatively influences the relationship between CQ and satisfaction with life abroad” implies that cultural shock moderates the CQ-life satisfaction relationship.
Methodological
8. How many of your students came from the Czech Republic? Could you control for whether students are local vs on exchange in your analysis? The relevance of CQ and cultural shock to life satisfaction may not be as apparent for local students as it is for exchange students.
9. Although scholars occasionally treat CQ as a reflective second-order, the construct is an aggregate multidimensional construct in the conceptualization by Ang and colleagues. You may wish to note this and model overall CQ as a composite score.
10. Please report correlations at the dimensional level so that future meta-analyses can incorporate data at that level.
11. Rönkkö et al. (2016) discuss the limitations of using PLS modeling to test hypothesized models. To avoid these limitations, could you test your hypothesis using covariance-based SEM or regression-based models? Or at least conduct covariance-based SEM analyses as a sensitivity analyses to the current PLS approach.
I wish you the best.
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.
Arnett, J. J. (2002). The psychology of globalization. American Psychologist, 57(10), 774-783.
Lee, Y. T., Masuda, A. D., Fu, X., & Reiche, B. S. (2018). Navigating between home, host, and global: Consequences of multicultural team members’ identity configurations. Academy of Management Discoveries, 4(2), 180-201.
Lisak, A., & Erez, M. (2015). Leadership emergence in multicultural teams: The power of global characteristics. Journal of World Business, 50(1), 3-14.
Rönkkö, M., McIntosh, C. N., Antonakis, J., & Edwards, J. R. (2016). Partial least squares path modeling: Time for some serious second thoughts. Journal of Operations Management, 47-48, 9-27.
Schlaegel, C., Richter, N. F., & Taras, V. (2021). Cultural intelligence and work-related outcomes: A meta-analytic examination of joint effects and incremental predictive validity. Journal of World Business, 56(4), 101209.
Shokef, E., & Erez, M. (2006). Global work culture and global identity, as a platform for a shared understanding in multicultural teams. In National culture and groups: Research on Managing Groups and Teams, 9, 325-352. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Author Response
Responds to reviewers´ comments:
Reviewer 1:
Comment 1: We explain especially in introduction (in its second paragraph) the importance of our study, its contribution to the existing findings and its novelty.
Comment 2: We extend our explanation how CQ relates to cultural identity in section 3.1, mainly its last paragraph (pages 287-296).
Comment 3: We mention studies of Rockstuhl and van Dyne (2018) or Schlaegel (2021) on pages 531 and 532.
Comment 4: We deleted one paragraph in section 2.3.
Comment 5: We mention affective component of CQ on pages 181-184.
Comment 6: We discuss temporal dimension of culture shock on pages 547-573 when we also indicate what further research should investigate.
Comment 7: We change the strong formulation according to your recommendation and we also reformulated H2.
Comment 8: We respond to your question and comments at pages 327-332.
Comment 9: We respond to your comments at pages 396-398.
Comment 10: Unfortunately, correlations report at the dimensional level would extend too much the extent of the study and we did not incorporate it in our article.
Comment 11: We deal with your comments at pages 401-406.
Thank you for valuable comments that help us to improve the quality of our article.
Regards
The authors
Reviewer 2 Report
I appreciate the capability of overall clarity of the paper and the argumentation pertinence. I think it might be interesting in the discussion to have a deeper exploration of the possible connection between the results also with respect to the peculiar characteristics of the sample used in the research
Author Response
Responds to reviewers´ comments:
Reviewer 2:
We briefly mention limitation with respect to the peculiar characteristics of the sample used in the research in our conclusion.
Thank you for valuable comments that help us to improve the quality of our article.
Regards
The authors
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
socscie-2141727-v2
What makes people abroad satisfied? The role of cultural intelligence, cultural identity, and cultural shock.
I have now had a chance to read and review the revised version of the manuscript entitled “What makes people abroad satisfied? The role of cultural intelligence, cultural identity, and cultural shock.” (socscie-2141727-v2).
I thank the authors for their responsiveness to the previous comments. At this point, my comments have been largely addressed.
Below are my suggestions for addressing two remaining points.
1. Revisit the point on the exogeneous nature of CQ and cultural identity in the discussion. The authors may have been hesitant to pick up the prior suggestion to treat cultural identity as a control variable. However, given that cultural identity refers to one’s home-culture, the added argument that those with higher CQ might change their identity as they better understand those from other cultures implies that CQ should be negatively related with (home) cultural identity when studying abroad. This is not the empirical result that you find. In your discussion, you may thus want to revisit the idea that CQ and cultural identity have been treated as exogenous constructs in the prior literature and that future research could therefore study the relationship between both constructs using longitudinal or cross-lagged panel methods.
2. My previous suggestion to report correlations at the dimensional level may have been misunderstood. I did not imply that you should run and report all analyses at the dimensional level. That would indeed extend the study beyond the scope. Instead, what I had asked for was to include a descriptive table (means, standard deviations, correlations, and reliabilities) that reports these data at the dimensional level. Such data is necessary to advance the cumulative science of CQ and serves as a critical input to future meta-analyses. You could even report this table in an Appendix so as to not interrupt the flow of your manuscript.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you again for your valuable comments. We reformulated or slightly changed the parts concerning the relationships between CQ and cultural identity – see rows 58-66 and 575-605. We also add to the Appendix the table containing Cultural intelligence indicators descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviations, correlations). We hope that these changes are according to your ideas.
The authors
