A study of risk perception among construction professionals

The problem of effective risk management has come under recent scrutiny due to the persistence of project objectives not being met because of risk. Decisions within the construction industry involve large capital expenditure that can result in adverse financial outcomes if risk is not judged appropriately. In addition, construction contributes substantially to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of every country by providing fixed capital formation and depending on several sectors for its inputs. Thereby offering employment to many people directly and indirectly. Current practices to mitigate risk include the use of planning tools, information systems among other, but the result is that of human decision and that is where judgement becomes important. Therefore, the significance of understanding how construction professionals perceive risk as part of their operational and executive decision making cannot be over emphasised. Such decisions inadvertently affect the performance of projects that are often large in scale and can have a substantial impact on public and private sector capital budgets. The ability of such professionals to address risk in their day-to-day activities is influenced by their risk perception. Establishing and developing awareness of that perception should enable construction professionals to make more viable risk decisions. The problem with current improvement efforts is that provisions address the physical aspects and laying down practices to follow, without considering the individual’s behaviour in decision making. The significance of this study is that it adopted a different approach from the conventional treatment of risk as an external phenomenon by considering the practitioner as key to achieving improvement in risk management efforts. It is therefore important to demonstrate what influence the risk decisions of these professionals and to lead to how these factors can be used to augment the risk decisions that are made. Review of extant literature showed that these factors, gender, age group, experience, profession, educational attainment, personality, value systems and emotion essentially drive one’s perception. These factors are adopted as a foundation for the study that forms the basis of the thesis. Research on these determinant factors conducted revealed that age group, experience, educational attainment, value systems and emotion have significant impact on risk perception when modelled individually, and age group, technicians out of educational attainment and value systems when combined with other factors.