How fair is construction business in Australia? Perception of Consultant Quantity Surveyors

Creating and managing a fair work environment is a crucial undertaking for management to increasing talent retention and improving organisational efficiency. Hitherto, little or no empirical study has done to investigate how construction employees perceive fairness at work and if their perceived fairness is positively associated with their emotion and pro-social behaviours. In addressing this gap, an online questionnaire survey was undertaken across 50 consultant quantity surveyors in the Australian construction industry to examine their perception of fairness at work and if their perceived fairness would associate with their emotion and behaviours. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a higher level of interpersonal fairness than distributive, procedural and information fairness in the Australian construction workplace. Furthermore, it is found that employees’ perceived interpersonal, informational and procedural fairness have strong positive correlations with their level of confidence, satisfaction, trust, harmony, enthusiasm and stress within the company, and that, in presence of a trusting, harmonious and active working relationship employees are very likely to adopt righteous, sportsmanship and courteous behaviours. In summary, the findings inform company management the types of perceived fairness that are associated with employees’ emotion and behaviours, and thus enable them to develop more targeted human resource management strategies to improve their organisational performance.