The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards, whose major challenge is customer satisfaction in markets that have become global, have the lowest certification rate in Africa. The purpose of this article is to highlight the mixed capacity of their practices to improve the cultural satisfaction of African workers (internal clients). The methodology was based successively on a qualitative and a quantitative study. The first, qualitative, focuses on twenty (20) semi-directive interviews of about thirty minutes each, documentary studies and fundamentally reveals a mismatch between Western ISO quality practices and African culture. They are perceived in substance as an "overload" because of the formalism. The second, quantitative, collected data from one hundred and three (103) employees of ISO-certified Ivorian agro-industrial companies and basically involves multiple regressions. The results of the main components analysis confirm the dimensions, control, infrastructure and human resources of ISO quality practices and then reveal the family and collectivist dimensions of cultural satisfaction that are valuable for workers; the hypothesis tests show significant limitations in the ability of ISO quality practices to improve cultural satisfaction in Ivorian agro-industrial enterprises. They highlight very different effects from the three dimensions mentioned. Those effects are respectively mixed, insignificant and significant for the control, infrastructural and human dimensions of these practices of Western origin imposed in Africa and elsewhere. Family cultural values remain at the heart of the challenge and hope is born of procedural collectivism.

Keywords: Quality practices, Cultural satisfaction, ISO standards, Ivorian agro-industrial enterprises.