Ethical climate and whistle-blowing: An empirical study of Taiwan's construction industry

There is a plethora of alleged and/or proven cases of illegal and unethical behaviors in construction organizations or activities,such as fraudulent practices of official-trader collusion. these problems often lead to threats to labor safety,environment,quality of the construction quality and invaluable lives of people. therefore,how to promote engineering ethics in the construction industry is a topic must be explored and discussed further. there is limited existing research regarding the influences of engineering ethics on national construction projects,let alone research on related issues from the perspective of construction organizations. this research aims at exploring ethical climate and whistle-blowing within the construction organizations in taiwan by conducting a questionnaire survey. there are 458 valid returned questionnaires. by using the methods of hierarchical regression analysis and structural equation modeling to analyze the questionnaire results,this study discusses the relationships between organizational ethical climate and whistle-blowing existed in taiwan's construction organizations,and make the findings as follows: (1) the ethical climate dimension of construction organizations is similar to that of ordinary enterprise organization,and the major component of their ethical climate is law and rules; (2) generally,the members in the surveyed construction organizations have the tendency of whistle-blowing. the establishment of organizational ethical climate helps the members of these construction organizations to improve their whistle-blowing intention; and (3) if an organization has a more positive ethical climate,its members have higher intentions of whistle-blowing. © 2013 pakistan journal of statistics.