Cultural Intelligence and its Relationship with Job Performance of Reporters in Iranian English Newspapers and News Agencies Having an English Website

This research aims to study the relationship between cultural intelligence, also known as cultural quotient (CQ), and job performance (JP) among Iranian reporters in local English newspapers and news agencies in Iran’s capital, Tehran. In the survey-type and questionnaire based study some 113 reports, out of 130, were examined at three newspapers and six news agencies. Two sets of standard questionnaires were hand delivered, given to either reporters themselves or their supervisors for distribution among them. The CQ questionnaire was designed by the Cultural Intelligence Center (2005) in the United States and JP by Paterson (1990). An SPSS software program was used to analyze the collected data and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was employed to measure reliability and consistency of data. The figures turned out to be 0.880 and 0.836 for CQ and JP respectively. The research reveals that there are differences among reporters regarding their evaluative attitudes towards CQ and JP. The findings specifically show that 0.9 percent of respondents have low CQ, 22.1 percent have average CQ, 60.2 percent have high CQ, and 16.8 percent have very high CQ. Additionally, reporters vary in their job performance as 6.2 percent of them have average JP, 39.8 percent have high and 54 percent have very high JP. This study illustrates that there is no relation between CQ and JP and therefore, CQ has no direct effect on JP. Among the four dimensions of CQ only cognitive proved to have an impact on JP.