Thinking about cultural assumptions, referred to as cultural metacognition, can help increase awareness, build trust, and create successful marketing and sales outcomes. The role of cultural metacognition in marketing and sales education helps students build a cultural metacognition knowledge base and promotes appreciation of its importance and effect on business enhancement. The context of this article will help amplify knowledge, ideas, and skills necessary to connect various issues of teaching and learning cultural metacognition. This article will facilitate business educators' teaching practices that foster learning cultural metacognition and its effects on marketing and sales. The ultimate goal is to help elevate teaching, learning, and assessment practices related to the topic of cultural metacognition in marketing and sales education.
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In his seminal work, Hart (1965) talked about the “feeling-of-knowing” experience linked to long-term memory, which forged the way for further studies focused on metacognition. Flavell (1976,1979, 1987) used the term metacognition to present a conceptual model of cognitive monitoring. This encouraged educational researchers to develop interventions that would increase cognitive monitoring, on the premise that cognitive monitoring would lead to better learning. Flavell’s model identified metacognition as one’s self-knowledge about cognition (metacognitive knowledge) and regulation of cognition (metacognitive regulation), or strategies for doing so. Flavell felt that everyone has the ability to monitor, track, evaluate, and change their thinking and learning processes.
Chua, Morris, and Mor (2012) gathered from research that cultural metacognition is a skill that enables individuals to reflect on “cultural assumptions in order to prepare for, adapt to, and learn from intercultural interactions” (p. 116). More than just simply knowing about culture, it includes the skill of understanding and collaborating knowledge. It involves the skills of monitoring, evaluating, and coordinating cognitive processes that help advance business practices.
Intercultural effectiveness requires forging close working relationships with people from various cultural backgrounds (Black, Mendenhall, & Oddou, 1991). Interactions with people from various cultures expose students and colleagues to ideas and angles that add new insights and diversity (Chua, Morris, & Mor, 2012). “The habit and skill of thinking about one’s own and other’s culturally based assumptions presumably enables individuals to communicate better, to put people at ease, and to avoid misunderstandings and tensions” (Chua, Morris, & Mor, 2102, p. 117). Conversely, the failure of managers from various cultures and countries to work effectively with one another can lead to business-structure demise (Hagel & Brown, 2005).