Surveyors' perspectives on ethics in organisational culture

This paper investigates perceptions on ethics amongst surveyors working in Hong Kong. Objectives of the study are to develop an organisational ethics model, to examine the dominant and significantly different ethical climate and culture types amongst private‐ and public‐sector organisations that employ surveyors, and to determine any effects of the existence of ethical codes. It is postulated that ethical behaviours have an impact on the final project outcome. The empirical work is of survey design and the data are analysed using principal component factor analysis, correlation and analysis of variance. The results yield a number of factors and the strength of factors present differs between public and private organisations with a large number of respondents indicating uncertainty of the presence of ethical codes.