BRIBERY INTENTION IN CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY : AN APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR

Illegal and unethical behaviors of the construction industry affect people's lives and health more than the same problems of the other industries. Among these behaviors, the construction industry is mostly criticized for bribery scandals. According to the survey of the Ministry of Justice in Taiwan over the past years, bribery cases involving public engineering projects and governmental procurements account for a rather large portion of the indicted corruption cases. Transparency International's "Bribe Payer Index" indicates people in construction-related industries are the most likely to pay bribes. Poor construction quality directly and indirectly caused by bribery poses a great threat to public safety, organizational reputation and economic development. However, there is a limited number of existing research on the bribery problem of the construction industry. This study is an empirical attempt to explore bribery intention and its affecting factors among the construction organizations in Taiwan by conducting a questionnaire survey. The theory of planned behavior was used in this study to build its research model (covering elements of attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavior control, and intention). Totally 431 valid samples were returned. To explore the factors affecting bribery intention, this study adopted Pearson's correlation analysis to discuss about the connections among the questionnaire respondents' attitudes to bribery, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and bribery intention. A multi-regression analysis was then conducted to test if the planned behavior theory can effectively predict bribery intention. The research found (1) according to the results of Pearson's correlation analysis, the respondents' bribery intention, attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control are positively correlated with one another; (2) according to the results of the multi-regression analysis, bribery intention can be explained through attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control with an adjusted R² value of 0.591, meaning 59.1% of the bribery intention's variances can be explained through the three dimensions. In addition, each of the three dimensions has a significant influence on the respondents' behavior intentions.