The use of engineering ethics for the betterment of service delivery : the case of Ingquza Hill and Elundini local municipalities

Abstract

Service delivery is the central purpose for municipalities and municipal engineers are at the forefront of this function. They must not only perform services according to established standards, but also control public opinion, as the municipal sector has been severely harmed by past unethical activities that have jeopardized municipal engineering's integrity. This research is aimed to investigate “the application of ethical engineering principles can be utilized to improve service delivery”. This will determine if there is an association between engineering ethics and the quality of the services supplied. It will also determine whether engineering ethics can be used to motivate people to provide better service. The research will explore the concept of professional engineering ethics and whether its application could better improve service provision for communities. The study environments are the Ingquza Hill Municipality and the Elundini Municipality which have permitted the researcher to develop an ethical decision-making model that the identified case study municipalities would consider implementing. A pilot study was conducted with employees within the civil engineering discipline who were identified from the municipal organizational structure. The participants were interviewed using a questionnaire with 42 structured questions and 7 open-ended questions. Inferential statistics were then used to analyse the data. Honesty and integrity were deemed to be primary trepidations for municipal engineers. Political meddling was an additional major concern that was assessed to have an impact on decision-making. Professional service providers who worked for the case study towns were used in the main study. From the main study, fraud and corruption driven by the client were identified as the leading cause of ethical compromise. Organizational promotion of ethical behaviour was found to occur significantly more at Elundini than at Ingquza Hill. Unethical practices are perceived to occur more at Ingquza Hill than at Elundini as evidenced from the responses received from each municipality’s service providers. The study resulted in the formulation of a tool for enabling ethical decision-making. The tool aimed to simplify decision-making, resulting in superior engineering judgment and humanizing the output which is service delivery. Management will be responsible for implementing/testing the model with the researcher’s guidance.