A Comparative study on the ethical perceptions of contractors and designers in the Malaysian Construction Industry

Abstract

Corporate ethics together with CSR is becoming a new requirement for a successful business in the 21st century. This trend continues to be strengthened throughout the industry and the construction industry cannot be exceptional. Further the construction industry suffers from the notorious image that the ethical standard in construction cannot meet the expectation of the society. The unique feature of construction is that it is based on projects and the primary stakeholders of construction projects are clients, designers and contractors. Therefore, for construction ethics management, different approaches might be required from other industries. In construction projects, designers and contractors both work for clients, but their roles and responsibilities are quite different in many aspects, and often this leads to confrontational situations during the execution of the projects. This paper investigates the ethical perceptions of designers and contractors in the Malaysian construction industry. 18-major ethical issues have been used in the questionnaire survey. 8-construction companies (contractors) and 8-engineering consulting firms (designers) have been involved in the survey. The ethical issues are ranked based on „frequency‟ and „seriousness‟ for contractors and designers respectively. In addition the relationship between demographic factors and ethical issues, comparisons between the ethical perceptions of contractors and designers have been analyzed through SPSS. The outcome shows that there is no significant difference between contractors and designers in terms of „seriousness‟. For „frequency‟ of ethical issues, there seems to be some differences between them. The result also indicates that demographic factors do not influence the ethical perception. Overall, contractors and designers in Malaysia have similar ethical perceptions despite the differences in their roles and responsibilities in construction projects. This result is in line with the previous researches in UK and South Korea. Future researches in other countries are recommended to establish a theoretical background of ethical perceptions of construction professionals.