Ethical behaviour of Nigerian building industry professionals in the procurement of building projects

Following the growing consensus within and outside the building industry that corruption and other unethical practices are endemic in the building industry, coupled with scarce empirical academic research on professional ethics in the Nigerian building industry, there is need to examine the ethical behaviour and ideology of the professionals involved in the procurement chain. Consequently, the study sets out to unravel the ethical. behaviour of the Nigerian building industry professionals in the procurement of building projects as well as the nature and prevalence of the ethical impropriety obtainable at various stages in the building projects procurement chain. One hundred and ninety two professionals were sampled from 108 construction organisations comprising 55 consultancy organisations, 35 contracting organisations and 18 client organisations in selected Nigerian major citics. Survey and correlational research designs were employed. Descriptive statistics was used in analysing the data while the hypotheses were tested. using one way analysis of variance, Chi-Square, Kruskal-Wallis tests and Mann-Whitney U test at 0.05 levels of significance. The results indicate that award of contracts by professionals based on social ties and personal interests top the list of twenty-two most prevalent ethical impropriety in the industry. Dominant ethical ideology of building industry professionals is situationism; Quantity surveyors were perceived as the most susceptible to bribery; greed and inordinate desire for materialism top the list of eighteen factors identified as reasons for professional ethical impropriety. Finally and expectedly, ethical impropriety generally has no favourable impact on project performance. The tests of the hypotheses led to the conclusion that there is no statistically significant difference in the ethical ideology of different categories of construction professionals, no significant difference in the degree of susceptibility of professional groups in the building industry to bribery and significant association exist between ethical impropriety and project performance. Major contributions of this research to the existing body of knowledge include the identification of twenty-two forms of impropriety of the Nigerian building industry professionals, thereby providing information. on curtailing such ethical impropriety. The identification of situationism as the dominant ethical ideology of the Nigerian building industry professionals would be of interest to policy makers, and intra professional ethical comparison, which is a bold step and necessary benchmark for resolving ethical issues in the construction industry. The study recommends among others, adoption of electronic-tendering (e-tendering) to avoid bias in tendering evaluation, adequate and prompt payment for professional services to prevent professionals from depending on contractors and sub-contractors. The clients should. ensure that discretionary powers of quantity surveyors in the procurement of building projects are limited or subjected to third party verification. Finally, further enquiry is needed to explore the types of measures that might help curb unethical practices in the procurement of building projects.