The Relationship between Iranian EFL Teachers’ Big-Five Traits and their Intercultural Intelligence

Since hiring qualified teachers for intercultural classes seems to be a delicate and important task, the researchers of this study find it of utmost value to discover any important connection between the personality traits of teachers and their intercultural intelligence. To this aim, the Big Five Personality Traits questionnaire, which is used widely throughout the world to discover individuals’ personalities and differences, and the Intercultural Intelligence questionnaire (Caputo et al. ۲۰۱۹) to measure teachers’ ability to identify intercultural variations and styles of negotiation, were administered to ۲۰۳ Iranian EFL teachers who taught English in various language institutes and Universities in Iran. To find the interrelationship among the Personality Traits and Intercultural Intelligence, a model was suggested and verified by means of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results of the study showed that among five personality traits, four sub-constructs (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness) are positive significant predictors of Intercultural intelligence; however, Neuroticism is not a significant predictor of overall Intercultural intelligence. This study could provide teachers and educational policymakers with some implications, such as being conscious about teachers’ different personality traits while they are planning for hiring teachers.

Keywords:

Big-Five Traits , EFL Teachers , Intercultural Intelligence , Personality Trait