Sustainability attitude and performance of construction enterprises: A China study

Construction industries have significant impacts on the economy, society and environment. To transform construction industry towards sustainability, construction enterprises' perceptions and performance on sustainability needs to be understood and evaluated, which has not be fully explored by existing studies. This paper holistically examines the Chinese construction enterprises’ attitude towards and performance on various aspects of sustainability (e.g. the economic, social and environmental aspects) in order to identify those aspects the firms perceive to be the most and least important and those aspects the firms perform best and worst on. The associations among the sustainability attitude, sustainability performance, and firm size are also explored. The findings show that quality management and customer service are perceived as the most important as well as the best-performed aspects by the firms while supporting community development is the least important and worst-performed aspect. Sustainability attitude is positively correlated with performance, and larger firms tend to have better sustainability performance than that of small ones. However, larger construction firms do not necessarily perceive sustainability more important. This study provides a useful reference for policy makers and researchers to understand how sustainability is perceived and implemented by the Chinese construction firms.