BUSI 682 Week 8 Annotated Bibliography 2 Example

Assessing and Responding to Risk in International Projects: An Annotated Bibliography for a Cross-Border Plant Project

Introduction

After the redesign described in my first bibliography, our company's board asked the operations team to plan its first factory outside the United States, a 140,000-square-foot assembly plant near Monterrey, Mexico, estimated at $38 million and two years to build. The decision will be made with a risk assessment that, so far, consists of a risk matrix built in one meeting. I chose assessing and responding to risk in international projects from the instructor's list to learn what current research says about doing this better. Through the Jerry Falwell Library I ran searches in its business databases and the ASCE Library, kept to peer-reviewed work published since 2019, with "international project risk," "political risk," "country risk" and "risk response," and kept eight that together cover the stages of risk management from the decision to enter a country through the response to specific risks.

Annotated Sources

Chang, T., Deng, X., Hwang, B.-G., & Zhao, X. (2019). Improving quantitative assessment of political risk in international construction projects: The case of Chinese construction companies. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 145(12), Article 04019083. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001738

Chang et al. (2019) noted that research on political risk in international business offers few quantitative methods suited to construction projects abroad. Starting from a literature review and pilot interviews with ten industry experts, they identified 36 political risk variables, surveyed 155 respondents and used confirmatory factor analysis to group the variables into six external driver components and six internal vulnerability components. Their assessment model, built on vulnerability theory and the principle that a system is only as strong as its weakest part, was validated with 294 cases from 45 Chinese construction companies. The study is rigorous and the validation sample is large, but all cases come from Chinese firms, whose political exposures abroad may differ from a U.S. manufacturer's. Its main lesson for our plant applies regardless: political risk depends on the company's own vulnerabilities as well as on the host country. Our board's matrix rated Mexican policy risk without asking how dependent our plan is on one tariff arrangement, which the model would treat as a vulnerability we control.

Denicol, J., Davies, A., & Krystallis, I. (2020). What are the causes and cures of poor megaproject performance? A systematic literature review and research agenda. Project Management Journal, 51(3), 328-345. https://doi.org/10.1177/8756972819896113

Denicol et al. (2020) systematically reviewed the megaproject management literature, screening 6,007 titles and abstracts and analyzing 86 full papers, and identified 18 causes of poor megaproject performance and 54 cures. They proposed treating megaprojects as large inter-organizational production systems and set out five research directions, including designing the system architecture, learning from manufacturing, building collaborations, engaging institutions and communities, and integrating the supply chain. As a systematic review, the article's strength is breadth; its limitation for my purpose is scale, since a $38 million plant is far from a megaproject. Even so, several of its themes fit. Our plant depends on a general contractor, an equipment supplier in Germany and a utility connection from a Mexican state agency, so it is a small inter-organizational system. The review's attention to engaging institutions and communities suggests adding the state agency and the local municipality to our risk register as stakeholders whose timing we cannot control, rather than treating the utility connection as a simple task.

Li, G., Chen, C., Zhang, G., & Martek, I. (2020). Bid/no-bid decision factors for Chinese international contractors in international construction projects. Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 27(7), 1619-1643. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-11-2018-0526

Li et al. (2020) asked which factors international contractors weigh when deciding whether to pursue a project abroad. From a literature review they identified 41 factors and surveyed 119 project and bidding managers at Chinese international contractors of various sizes, using ranking, nonparametric tests and factor analysis. Nine major groups of factors emerged, with the contractor's own capability and the country risk of the host country ranked most important, and large and smaller firms differed in how they ranked several factors. The study's sample is solid for its population, but it captures stated priorities rather than actual decisions and outcomes. The pairing of capability with country risk is the useful insight for our board. Our proposal discusses Mexico's risks at length and says almost nothing about our own capability, although we have never built or run a plant abroad. Following this study, the go decision should weigh whether we have, or can hire, the international operations experience the project requires, not only whether Mexico is a safe place to build.

Mysore, K., Kirytopoulos, K., Ahn, S., & Ma, T. (2021). Adversarial factors in multi-stakeholders' engagement of global-IT projects. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 14(2), 445-471. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-01-2019-0014

Mysore et al. (2021) set out to identify the adverse situations that damage stakeholder engagement in globally distributed information technology projects. A web survey of 144 stakeholders in such projects rated 26 adverse situations, which exploratory factor analysis grouped into eight factors; ranked by relative importance, the top factors were dysfunctional conflicts, a dearth of reasoning, glitches in project governance and clashes of personalities. The authors note that their focus on IT projects limits generalization to other sectors, and the survey measures perceived importance rather than effects on outcomes. I included it because most international risk research looks at external hazards such as politics and currency, while this study points to risks inside the project's relationships. Our plant will be managed jointly by a U.S. operations team, a Mexican plant manager we have not yet hired and a German equipment supplier, which is exactly the multi-stakeholder setting described. Governance glitches, such as unclear authority between the U.S. team and the plant manager, belong on our risk register before construction begins.

Oyuga, S., Ochieng, E. G., & Ngene, G. (2025). Moderating influence of cultural values on the relationship between governance and risk perception in large-scale infrastructure development projects. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 74(7), 2357-2382. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-04-2024-0244

Oyuga et al. (2025) examined how managers' cultural values shape the way they perceive risk in large infrastructure projects. Using mixed methods built on a survey with 597 responses from managers of renewable energy, road and rail projects in Kenya, and linear regression to test their hypotheses, they found that perceptions of country risk, the project's external debt structure, carbon risk and cultural values all significantly influenced managers' perceptions of infrastructure risk, and that demographic factors such as experience and board membership moderately influenced those perceptions. The large sample is a strength, though the single-country setting and focus on debt-financed public infrastructure limit how directly it applies to a private plant. Its broader point matters for us. If cultural values and experience shape how managers perceive the same risk, then our risk matrix, built by four U.S. managers in one meeting, reflects their perspective. Before the board decides, I would ask our Mexican legal adviser and the candidate plant managers to rate the same risks independently and compare the results.

Qazi, A., & Simsekler, M. C. E. (2021). Risk assessment of construction projects using Monte Carlo simulation. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 14(5), 1202-1218. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-03-2020-0097

Qazi and Simsekler (2021) proposed a process for prioritizing project risks that accounts for the decision maker's risk attitude, uncertainty in probability and impact ratings and correlations among risk assessments. Applying Monte Carlo simulation to risk ratings from a real construction project, they found that the simulation identified low-probability, high-impact risks that a conventional matrix-based ranking had overlooked, and that relying on expected values alone could miss critical risks. The study is a single application, so it demonstrates the method rather than proving it works better in general. For our project, the finding is a direct warning about the board's matrix. A risk such as a prolonged disruption at the border crossing our parts would use is rated low probability and therefore sits in the matrix's safe zone, yet its impact on the plant's first year could be severe. A matrix sorts risks into boxes; it does not tell you which box will hurt you most. Running a simple simulation on our ratings would show which risks deserve attention despite low scores.

Siraj, N. B., & Fayek, A. R. (2019). Risk identification and common risks in construction: Literature review and content analysis. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 145(9), Article 03119004. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001685

Siraj and Fayek (2019) reviewed how construction research identifies and classifies risk. Their systematic review and content analysis of 130 articles from well-regarded journals over three decades found that most studies identified risks for infrastructure projects in Asia and Europe, usually classified by nature or simply listed, and relied mainly on information-gathering techniques such as surveys and interviews, with diagramming and analysis techniques seldom used. The most frequently identified risks were unexpected changes in the inflation rate, design errors and poor engineering, and changes in government laws, regulations and policies. The review is thorough and its sample of articles broad, though it describes what researchers studied rather than what happens on projects. It gives our team a checklist to test our register against. Our matrix includes regulatory change but not inflation, even though a two-year build with a peso-denominated contract exposes us to both. It also suggests that we use a diagramming technique, such as a cause-and-effect diagram, alongside our brainstorming.

Yan, P., Liu, J., Zhao, X., & Skitmore, M. (2022). Risk response incorporating risk preferences in international construction projects. Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 29(9), 3499-3519. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-03-2019-0132

Yan et al. (2022) developed a decision method for choosing risk responses on international construction projects that reflects project managers' differing risk preferences. Their optimization model simultaneously minimizes the expected losses from risk events and the total cost of responses, was solved with an interactive fuzzy method and was demonstrated on a real international industrial plant project. Sensitivity analysis showed that more risk-averse managers chose responses that mitigated a larger share of expected losses at a higher total cost. The model is technical and demonstrated on a single project, so its value for practitioners is more conceptual than procedural. The concept is important for our board, which must decide how much to spend on responses such as political risk insurance, a second customs broker and a currency hedge. The study shows that the right spending depends on how risk-averse the company chooses to be, which is a decision the board should make explicitly before the project team builds a response plan, not leave implicit in each manager's choices.

Synthesis

The eight studies, read in order, suggest a sequence for the Monterrey decision. First, the decision to enter should weigh our own capability against the host country's risk (Li et al., 2020) and treat political risk as partly a matter of our own vulnerabilities (Chang et al., 2019). Second, risk identification should use a broader checklist and more than one technique (Siraj & Fayek, 2019), include risks in the project's relationships (Mysore et al., 2021) and engage institutions and communities (Denicol et al., 2020). Third, assessment should draw ratings from people with different backgrounds (Oyuga et al., 2025) and test the matrix with simulation (Qazi & Simsekler, 2021). Fourth, responses should follow a risk appetite the board sets openly (Yan et al., 2022). The main gap is that nearly all of this research concerns construction contractors and infrastructure, not manufacturers building their first plant abroad, so the company should record its own experience as it goes.