Professional Progression, Company Commitment, and Project Choice: An Empirical Investigation into Professional Staff Values in Construction

摘要

Values, or core beliefs that individuals experience as standards that guide how they should function, is emerging as a critical factor linked to workers' decisions to remain in or depart from the construction industry. Many exploring satisfaction and work values build off of prior work in psychology and nursing, emphasizing the examination of misalignments between occupational or work values and company values. This paper describes the development and implementation of the work values of professional staff in construction survey, which is tailored to examine the importance of specific values to the career satisfaction of professional staff within the construction industry. Survey items were initially developed based on review of existing worker's values literature from across industries. The resulting set of initial survey items were then adapted to the construction industry context through focus group discussions with professional staff. The final list included 12 items that were administered in a questionnaire survey in the summer of 2016 to 225 construction workers at 37 companies. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and established internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha on a subset of the analytical sample data (n = 225). The results indicate that three work value factors are important to the career satisfaction of professional staff in construction: professional progression, company commitment, and project choice.