Beyond Cultural Awareness: A Cultural Intelligence–Strategic Management Integration Framework for Organizational Effectiveness

This conceptual article develops the Cultural Intelligence–Strategic Management Integration (CQ–SMI) framework to explain how organizations convert culturally intelligent managerial judgment into repeatable strategic-management capabilities. Drawing on scholarship concerning cultural intelligence, organizational cultural intelligence, dynamic capabilities, and strategic decision-making, the article distinguishes individual and team cultural intelligence from the organizational routines through which culturally informed knowledge influences strategy. The proposed framework identifies four interconnected mechanisms: culturally informed strategic sensing, deliberative decision governance, context-sensitive resource orchestration, and coordinated strategic implementation. It also incorporates a feedback process through which organizations evaluate cross-cultural outcomes and revise their strategic routines. Nine theoretical propositions articulate the conditions under which these mechanisms may contribute to decision quality, coordination effectiveness, strategic adaptability, and organizational performance. The framework emphasizes that cultural intelligence alone does not guarantee organizational effectiveness; its strategic value depends on institutionalized practices, clear decision rights, knowledge integration, and managerial accountability. By specifying mechanisms and boundary conditions linking managerial cultural intelligence to strategic processes, the article contributes a process-oriented perspective to cross-cultural management research. It concludes with implications for managerial practice and a research agenda for operationalizing and empirically evaluating the proposed relationships.