Developing global leaders through building cultural self-awareness

A growing body of literature on global leadership acknowledges the importance of intercultural competencies, but has yet to address the fundamental role of implicitly learned cultural beliefs on global leader development. This article introduces cultural self-awareness as a mechanism that applies an explicit mode of learning based in social cognitive theory to the implicitly learned aspects of culture. Cultural self-awareness is the ability to identify personal beliefs and values that are sourced from one's cultural upbringing and to recognise the influence of this cultural conditioning on behaviour. Building cultural self-awareness can facilitate the development of intercultural competencies in global leaders through a process of examining the source of personal cultural beliefs and values, identifying the tendency to use personal beliefs as a reference for evaluating others, and recognising how specific cultural beliefs shape leadership behavioural responses.