Influential Factors in Cross-Country Standards Adoption from a Macroergonomics Perspective

With the acceleration of the global integration, an increasing number of projects which require multinational cooperation are carried out worldwide. Standards, as the common requirements and rules for companies involved in these cross-countries projects, become one of their primary concerns. However, different countries vary distinctly in standard systems and there are also substantial discrepancies among their standard contents under the influences of culture background, organization management, language, team behaviors, political issues, regulatory rules and other human factors domains. And thus, there can be many obstacles when companies endeavor to comply with more than one standard at the same time. Confusion during the process of standards adoption, according to statistics, is capable of causing a great loss, from the perspective of both economics and human resources. We conducted an in-depth literature review to generate a conceptual framework, which can orderly simplify cross-country standards adoption (CSA)’s factors. Afterwards, we identified potential influential factors in cross-country standards adoption from a macroergonomics perspective, and provided a new approach to cross-country standards adoption CSA’s study. More than 20 influential factors and around 40 indicators were summarized in our framework and key human factors related influential factors were discussed in this paper. Under the framework with those factors identified, it is promising to evaluate their impact quantitatively by using indicator(s) for each factor, and finally to propose insightful guidelines to smooth the process of cross-country projects, particularly in the areas of architecture, transportation and infrastructure construction.