Employees’ Self-Cultural Integration Through Cultural Intelligence: A Case of Finnish Firm

The paper analyses the culture's conceptual terrain from different scholarly perspectives, and how it has led to the emergence of different conceptualization of cultural intelligence. As such, cultural intelligence is described from the perspective of Earley et al.'s Thomas et al.'s and Plum's and then explained how Plum's conceptualization is a better construct to apply in the context of this paper and how it relates to the aims and objectives of this paper. The main purpose of the research is to see how cultural integration is enacted and carried out by foreign employees working in a firm that has completely different cultures from their own: the aim is to also see what factors or determinants form cultural intelligence. The research methodology consists of conducting an open-ended interview with six employees who were working in a finish firm and they were asked questions based on how did they achieve their integration and went about their daily interactions and abstract situations. For analysis, Braun and Clarke' (2006) steps of thematic analysis were adopted for studying and analyzing the interviewed transcripts as their method of analyzing is based at constructing a narrative story out of the data. The research proved what was assumed theoretically that culture is an evolving and negotiated social reality constructed by the social agents. The analysis part as result revealed that the daily interaction consists of the process of meaning-making complexities that lead to the evolvement of negotiated socio-cultural reality what we call cultural-integration on the part of employees. As the world is going through a transformation in the midst of changes brought upon the unprecedented immigration and seamless borders, cross cultural interactions and cultural adaptability has become an extremely important issue. The results of this study have thus important implications for mangers and business leaders to take culture and integration as an evolving concept and as a journey as they try to integrate foreign employees or sending people abroad on expatriate mission.