Cultural Agility
entry by Julie M. Marx, Global Family Expert at Expat Valley
Cultural Agility is a meta-competency that enables individuals to function effectively across culturally diverse situations by combining self-awareness, cultural humility, curiosity, and a repertoire of adaptable behaviors. In globally mobile lives, cultural agility shows up as the capacity to shift communication style, expectations, and problem-solving approaches across countries, workplaces, and communities without losing a coherent sense of self.
Comparable terms
Cross-cultural adaptability (Cultural Adaptation); Cultural Intelligence CQ (organizational psychology); Intercultural Competence (Cultural Adaptation); Global Mindset (Identity & Belonging)
Why this matters
This term matters because it reframes effective global living and working as a learnable, practice-based capacity rather than a fixed personality trait. Naming cultural agility helps families, educators, and organizations design development pathways for children, partners, and employees that go beyond information about a host culture and focus on flexible, ethical, and sustainable ways of moving between cultures.
Cross-references
Intercultural Competence (Cultural Adaptation); Intercultural Sensitivity (Identity & Belonging); Expandable Worldview (Identity & Belonging); Emotional Regulation (Wellbeing & Mental Health). Cultural Agility is the applied, behavioral expression of the perceptual and identity shifts described under Intercultural Competence, Intercultural Sensitivity, and Expandable Worldview, and it depends on Emotional Regulation to remain sustainable under the repeated demands of mobile life.
Sources
Caligiuri, P. (2012). Cultural agility: Building a pipeline of successful global professionals. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Wiley. This book sets out the Cultural Agility Competency Framework and defines cultural agility as the ability to work quickly, comfortably, and effectively in culturally novel environments, grounded in several years of empirical research with global professionals.
Caligiuri, P. (2021). Build your cultural agility: The nine competencies of successful global professionals. London: Kogan Page. translates the broader cultural agility framework into nine concrete competencies organized across self‑management (tolerance of ambiguity, curiosity, resilience), relationship‑management (humility, relationship‑building, perspective‑taking), and task‑management (cultural minimization, adaptation, integration).
Across a body of empirical work, Caligiuri and collaborators have shown that cultural agility can be developed through carefully designed international experiences, rather than being a fixed trait.
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