Personality, Character Strengths and Cultural Intelligence: "Extraversion" or "Openness" as Further Factors Associated to the Cultural Skills

At present the development and operation of cultural intelligence is studied in terms of their associations with certain aspects of personality. However, it is claimed that these studies on expatriates have not yet found the predictive power of personality traits on these cultural skills. The study discusses the results of three investigations in which a sample of military students was analyzed to explore the associations between the factors of the big five model personality, the variable cultural intelligence, and the character strength. The research hypothesis is that the personality factor Openness is much more associated to cultural intelligence than to Extraversion factor. Moreover, the strength of character called social intelligence, predicts the level of cultural intelligence of the military students. The results indicated that Openness is a positive predictor of general cultural intelligence of students, and the character strength of social intelligence positively predicts the cultural intelligence much more than other predictors that were part of the analized model.