THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF RESPONSIBILITY AND LEADER’S SUCCESS FROM AN ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE
1 Business School, University Kuala Lumpur (UniKL), Malaysia
2Supreme Audit Court of Iran (SAC), Kerman General Administration Office, Iran
3,4International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Malaysia
ABSTRACT
The present research aims at empirically revealing the leadership concepts from the holy Qur’an. Among plenty research on leadership only few account the religious views of leadership in particular from the Moslems’ source of knowledge, the Holy Qur’an. The concept of Taqwa, as a characteristic of Motaqeen according to the Qur’an, has been included of Spirituality and Responsibility dimensions. This research studies the relationship between responsibility and leader’s effectiveness. A cross-sectional approach was conducted in which responsibility was measured based on a self-constructed basis when leadership effectiveness was built up from the current scales in the literature. Analytical techniques including multiple regression and hierarchal regression by using SPSS were used to examine the hypotheses drawn from a sample of 135 companies. The results represent except forgiveness other dimensions of responsibility are significant and positively associated to leadership success.
© 2017 AESS Publications. All Rights Reserved.
Keywords:Leadership effectiveness, Motaqeen ,Responsibility, Spirituality, Taqwa.
ARTICLE HISTORY: Received: 25 April 2017, Revised: 10 July 2017, Accepted: 25 July 2017, Published: 3 August 2017
1. INTRODUCTION
The religion is recently the most influential concerns in peoples’ life through thoughts and values. There are three signs of Islamic reawakening according to Al-Qaradawi (2001) namely attending massive people who do prayers in the mosque, putting Hejab on women and increase in purchase and attention to religious books. He further mentioned the higher wish among souls to approach Allah is due to their feeling needs for further immortality in their lives. This marvel is more obvious among the Islamic countries. A few confirmations are the foundation and quick development of numerous Islamic banks, schools, and different organizations around the globe even in western nations. For instance Pope (2005) and Shoaib (2007) demonstrated that the Islamic Banking and fund has seen an exponential development from a solitary Egyptian bank in the 1960s to a flourishing industry that now has what might as well be called $500 billion industry with yearly development rate of 15% to 20%. Especially 100% of banks in Iran, Pakistan and Sudan are Riba free. The 95% of all retail banking in Saudi Arabia is done through Islamic organizations. Different markets, for example, Malaysia and Indonesia are moving progressively through an advancement arrange. Many conventional banks, for example, Citibank, HSBC and UBS, are changing over some of their administrations to adjust the Islamic model (Pope, 2005; Shoaib, 2007).
Even though a tremendous amount of research has been conducted to study leadership and leadership effectiveness (Northouse, 2012) they were originally set at the Western business environment. Yukl et al. (2002) stated that research on leadership during the last half century has been predominantly conducted in the USA. Western Europe and Canada had led few research as non-western societies. Besides the literature on administration is inadequate with regards to look into from Islamic viewpoint. Ali and Weir (2005) taking note of this shortage in examine from an Islamic viewpoint stressed that a great part of the momentum inquire about on the issue from an Islamic point of view needed profundity and at condition of Immaturity. Conversely, Shirazi et al. (1996) focused on that the standards of the administration as embraced by the Prophet Muhammad and the strategies for his initiative ought not be neglected in the interest to receive Western standards of management and leadership. The main point of this study is to explore the association between leaders’ responsibility and initiative successfulness from an Islamic perspective.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Qur'an was uncovered in the Arabic language, so to conceptualize a Qur'an term the Arabic root of the idea ought to be the base. In the Arabic dialect, the base of the word Taqwa is "Waka" which intends to protect or evade or save (Al-Asfahani, 1997). The idea of Taqwa has been deciphered in different routes by researchers. As indicated by Ibn-Kather (2000) the root importance of Taqwa is to maintain a distance from what one aversions. On the other hand, Al-Sharawi (2004) states that Taqwa means to void Allah’s punishment by doing what He commands, and keep away from doing what He forbids.
Ali (1997) depicted Taqwa as the dread of resisting the will of Allah, and compares it to the affection for Him. Taqwa can be characterized into two fundamental characteristics of Spirituality and the duty of Motaqeen against others (Responsibility). In this paper we concentrated on the Responsibility to study its impact on leadership effectiveness.
Hassan (2001) demonstrated five obligations of the leader in Islamic culture i.e. to lead the supplications (Imam), to give direction, to outfit directions, look after equity, and implement morals. Ali and Weir (2005) showed that in the Islamic culture individuals who are skilled and are in a place of having responsibility have a good and social commitment to decrease the gap between the rich and poor. In the Islamic view employers need to manage workers utilizing leniency, thoughtfulness and equity to be successful (Ali and Weir, 2005). Some portion of the leaders’ obligation is to be kind to his subordinates as in the Hadith described by Muslim the Prophet stated: "whoever turns into a leader among Muslims if he manages them in leniency may Allah remunerate him otherwise may Allah punish him".
In light of the previously mentioned a leader's duty remains for the leader's relationship toward his subordinates which he represents by controlling his outrage, honing Sadakah, being pardoning, being just, honest and patient. These measurements are morally in light of practices which Islam considers as essential human rights and charges leaders to do toward both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Qur'an sees individuals as having twofold parts in this world, one as a servant to Allah (worship) and one as vicegerent on earth. Servant status requests the worship of Allah and vicegerent requests the building of civilization (Hassan, 2001).
Business as a human action is a piece of the vicegerent status. Qur'an sees business as one means, among others, to satisfy the reason for human presence in this world. So the two statuses of individuals (worshiper and vicegerent) impact each other and ought to be coordinated and adjusted. That is why Islam considers work as a form of worship. In Tafseer Ibn-Kather (2002) Allah praised those who ask for the affairs of both this life and the hereafter. Hayyat Tayyibah which literally means good and happy life is described as a balanced life between the enjoyment of this worldly life and the duties towards the hereafter (Khalifa, 2003).
In the Islamic view, the fundamental aim of business is not to produce or maximize profit but to make and develop services and goods needed by all members of society in order to live the good life that Islam aims to develop and maintain for all human kind (Al-Qaradawi, 2001). Business organizations are established to serve society and develop the cause of communities (Harris, 2012).
As the individual employee is a part of society then this view creates a match between personal and organizational goals (Eims, 2012). This match prompts enthusiasm and responsibility regarding shared objectives in employee. Such an organization was titled by Ali and Weir (2005) as spiritually enlightened organization. Furthermore, to narrate Islamic business leadership effectiveness, business purpose has to be defined and considered as well. Khalifa (2003) defined business objective in Islam as “to produce and offer goods and services required and valued by people, to make opportunity for people to work and realize their mission in life, to develop themselves, to contribute to their societies, and to live a good life (Hayyat Tayyibah).
Business organizations would have the capacity to reach and manage the above reason just by creating benefit for the organizations and assuming liability in behaving people. Qur'an and custom of the Prophet Muhammad over and over underlined the significance of responsibility at work, and actually, the entire of Islam is based on firm responsibility and duty.
According to "Business Ethics in Islamic Context: Perspectives of a Muslim Business Leader" Abeng (1997) prospected that the duty of the business leader is critical to build up the culture of a venture. To represent its significance in the national and worldwide setting, a Muslim writer from Indonesia indicates with profound respect to Konosuke Matsushita, founder of Matsushita Electric Corporation, who in the 1930s already set up the seven moral principles and standards for sound business development, which likewise are praised by the Islam. Because of the dynamic business condition at that time, Muslims get themselves gone up against with genuine difficulties and need direction from an obviously created Islamic business morals. For this reason Abeng (1997) offers, initially, the basics of such morals: the most extreme significance of all kind of beneficial work and the conveyance of wealth in community; the employment of trade; the essential standards of opportunity and equity for business conducts; the recommendation of specific conducts, for example, tolerance, benefit intention, and awareness of Allah; and shared counsel. In his article, he exhibited his own view on leadership in business. It includes three essential dimensions: a rousing vision of high and achievable norms; an esteem framework in light of the standards of freedom, equity, advancing decency and business integrity, proficiency; and bravery to confront intense choices while putting one's entire trust in Allah.
Abbas (2009) composed a paper "Islamic perspectives on leadership: a model", in which, his motivation of research was to address the idea of leadership in Muslim nations. It looks to build up a model for understanding leadership in Islamic culture and talks about the elements which underline two sorts of leadership: the prophetic and caliphate. Moreover, the paper addresses the contention amongst idealism and realism and the ascent of tyrant leaders. His paper offers policymakers and analysts different roads on the best way to address the issue of leadership in an Islamic culture and introduces a hypothetical model for understanding issues relating to leaders and leadership in Islamic countries.
Faris and Parry (2011) conducted a research on the Islamic organizational leadership inside a Western country. This study tests qualitatively the connection between leadership, organizational culture and organizational effectiveness in Islamic associations in Australia in the beginning years of the 21st century. They likewise examined the contextual difficulties confronted by Islamic organizations in Western countries amid the early years of the 21st century. Qualitative and quantitative information were analyzed qualitatively. Theoretical sampling and theoretical coding created a positive and negative story-line. An excellent account of Muslim disenfranchisement and a few micro-stories of organizational intricacy enlivened the story-lines. They concluded that perpetually context was hazardous for leadership. Another conclusion was that leadership could not be considered productively outside of context. The third conclusion from this substantive setting was that an obstacle for Islamic leadership was to rebuild up the context of the organization. A hidden parallel with structure-agency theory was noted.
The leadership of Islamic institutions is confronted with the conventional administration challenges found in the literature. It must likewise accommodate a risky external context, a heterogeneous followership, the imperative part of religion, the impact of Imams, and expanding parts for women and young Muslims.
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND DEVELOPMENT OF HYPOTHESES
In reference to the literature review, a theoretical framework has been developed to illustrate the relationships between different dimensions of responsibility and leadership (Figure 1).
Despite the fact that several dimensions may impact leadership effectiveness, Taqwa and especially responsibility has been picked due to three reasons. The principal reason is that alternate factors influencing leader's effectiveness have been tremendously contemplated earlier and comparable outcomes are relied upon to be accomplished. The second reason is that Taqwa is a specification by which the Quranic leadership differentiate from the other leadership concepts. The third reason is the absence of empirical research studies about the connection amongst leadership and responsibility especially from an Islamic point of view.
Figure-1. Research Theoretical Framework
These hypotheses are constructed based on the theoretical rationale:
H1: The more responsible the leader the higher is the leader’s success (effectiveness).
H2: The higher generous the leader is in Sadakah the more the leader's success (effectiveness).
H3: The more the integrity of the leader the higher is the leader’s success (effectiveness).
H4: The greater emotionally control the leader the more is the leader’s success (effectiveness).
H5: The more forgiveness the leader is the greater is the leader’s success (effectiveness).
4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This study tries to set up and confirm suggested connections between a leader's level of responsibility and business administration success in an administrative setting. Accordingly, the business unit leader is the unit of analysis for this research. This examination initially decided the measurements of responsibility in light of the Qur'an and after that built up the dimensions of Taqwa manifestations. At that point, a cross-sectional technique was utilized which obliged information to be gathered from a population sample.
4.1. Sample and Sampling Method
The sample in this study is all companies listed in the Yemenis Chamber of Commerce in its capital of Sana’a. According to the guidelines by Hair et al. (2006) the sample size of this study includes 135 companies.
Because of inaccessibility of locations of the companies, non-probability sampling method was utilized in order to gather the data. Out of 380 directors and their subordinates to whom the questionnaires were sent, just 278 of them taken an interest in the survey which means 73 percent rate of participation.
4.2. Questionnaire Design
The majority of the existing instruments to measure responsibility were made for Christian samples and Islamic instruments very limited, the questionnaire used in this study was partly adopted from a measurement called Islamic Religious Behavior Questionnaire (IRBQ) developed by Dawood (2000). The Dawood’s questionnaire was later adjusted to better representing the context of this study. The final version of questionnaire includes of 28 questions to test responsibility. A five point Likert scale starting from 1 (never) to 5 (always) was employed.
4.3. Measurement of Leadership Success (Effectiveness)
The leadership success is conceptualized to associate employees' satisfaction and commitment to company's performance. This is similar to the approach adopted by Beh (2003) for the business leadership success measurement.
The questionnaire was developed according to the key dimensions of leadership success as defined by Yukl et al. (2002). The questionnaire, including of thirteen questions which had a five-point scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). There are two rationales for choosing this instrument. The first is that it measures the end-results of the leader's efforts rather than their attitude or behavior. The second reason is the instrument’s simple design, which makes it easy to be administered to individuals.
4.4. Cronbach’s Alpha
The vastly utilized index of internal consistency and reliability is the Cronbach’s alpha (Salkind, 2010). Internal consistency is the extent to which individual items correlate with one another or with the test total (Brownet al., 2011).
Table-1. Cronbach’s Alpha
| Variable | Number of Items | Alpha Cronbach’s |
| Integrity | 8 | .91 |
| Sadakah | 6 | .95 |
| Forgiveness | 5 | .86 |
| Emotional Control | 3 | .66 |
| Total | 22 | .85 |
As we can see in the Table 1, the Cronbach’s alpha for variables range from 0.66 to 0.95 which according to Hairet al. (2006) is considered as desirable.
5. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
The selection of appropriate method of analysis is decided by the hypotheses and characteristics of the data. This study intends to test the association between responsibility and leadership success from a Quranic perspective. This type of analysis requires appropriate statistical tools. With the advent of versatile and powerful computer software programs performing such analyses has been reasonably convenient for many researchers. To examine the research hypotheses, a multivariate analysis was utilized.
5.1. Descriptive Statistics
This study uses the mean to assess the central tendency due to the views of treating the Likert scale as interval scale (Salkind, 2010) while the dispersion is assessed by the standard deviation.
Table 2 represents the descriptive statistics of respondents’ ratings on responsibility and leadership success.
Table-2. Descriptive statistics for research variables
| Variable | Mean | STD |
| Integrity | 3.65 | .62 |
| Sadakah | 3.22 | .75 |
| Forgiveness | 3.46 | .59 |
| Emotional Control | 3.60 | .62 |
| Leadership effectiveness | 3.80 | .54 |
All variables were measured on a five-point scale; the mean scores of all variables were between 3.65 and 3.22. The range of standard deviation is moderately low .59 - .75. Integrity has the highest mean score 3.65 which indicates that Yemeni business leaders consider themselves as integrated leaders. The other three variables of responsibility have moderately high means 3.60, 3.46 and 3.22 which points out that Yemeni business leaders view themselves as responsible Muslim managers.
5.2. Correlation Analysis
To complement the shortcomings of the coefficient alpha, correlation analysis is used to further examine the internal consistency of the research instrument.
Table-3. Variables’ Correlation Analysis
| Variable | IN | SA | FO | EC | EF |
| Integrity | 1.00 | ||||
| Sadakah | 0.71** | 1.00 | |||
| Forgiveness | 0.56** | 0.61** | 1.00 | ||
| Emotional Control | 0.48** | 0.40** | 0.25** | 1.00 | |
| Leadership Effectiveness | 0.70** | 0.62** | 0.38** | 0.47** | 1.00 |
**significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)
From table 3 all responsibility dimensions were seen to be positively correlated with Business Leadership Success (Effectiveness).
5.3. Factor Analysis
Factor analysis was conducted to summarize correlation patterns among the variables hence a smaller number of items could represent the variables (Hair et al., 2006). A principal components analysis with varimax rotation was used to examine the factor structure of all variables. Since the sample size is 206 and in accordance with Hair et al. (2006) each item should load .50 or greater on one factor and .39 or less on the other factors.
Table-4. Factor analysis results for responsibility
| Items | Factors | |||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| He abides by an agreement he makes to his subordinates. | .83 | |||
| He keeps his promises with his subordinates. | .81 | |||
| He pays his subordinates their rights fully. | .74 | |||
| He doesn’t manipulate his subordinates. | .69 | |||
| He listens to all disputed parties before he makes his own judgments. | .63 | |||
| He accepts responsibility for his wrongs. | .61 | |||
| He doesn't overload his subordinates with assignments beyond their capabilities. | .61 | |||
| He keeps his subordinates’ secrets. | .60 | |||
| He gets involve in his subordinates concerns. | .82 | |||
| He helps his subordinates even if it requires his sacrifice. | .81 | |||
| He goes around looking for needy employees to help them. | .79 | |||
| He looks for opportunities to be of service to his subordinates. | .75 | |||
| He accepts excuses from his subordinates. | .79 | |||
| He depends on forgiveness more than punishments with his subordinates | .75 | |||
| He forgives his subordinate even if they hurt him on purpose | .74 | |||
| When someone at work hurts him he doesn’t recall the previous hurts | .71 | |||
| He doesn’t answer the misbehaviour with the same. | .68 | |||
| He becomes angry for silly matters. | .77 | |||
| He reacts to events by quick and immature decisions. | .74 | |||
| He is patient in negotiation. | .65 | |||
| Eigenvalue | 4.38 | 4.69 | 3.51 | 2.03 |
| % of Variance | 22.0 | 21.3 | 16.0 | 9.23 |
| KMO MSA | 0.94 | |||
Table 4 shows the factor analysis results after omitting the items that have cross loading (higher than .39) or low loading (less than .5). After the deletion MSA value is 0.94 and four factors emerged with eigenvalue greater than 1.0, explaining 68.47% of the variance with all items loaded in the range of 0.83 - 0.60. All items included in the extracted dimensions were derived from the same theorized factors, thus they would be awarded the same names i.e. Integrity, Sadakah, Forgiveness and Emotional control.
5.4. Hypotheses Testing and Results
The first hypothesis stated that leader's level of responsibility relates positively and significantly to the leader's success. Therefore, multiple regressions were conducted to examine the relationships between the responsibility dimensions; Integrity, Sadakah, Forgiveness and Emotional control and Business Leadership Success.
Table-5. Result of multiple regression
| Variable | Standardized β | p-value |
| Integrity | .49 | .00 |
| Sadakah | .27 | .00 |
| Forgiveness | -.11 | .07 |
| Emotional Control | .14 | .02 |
| F-value | 20.71 | |
| R2 | 0.56 | |
| Adjusted R2 | 0.54 |
According to the table 5, three out of four dimensions of Leader’s Responsibility were found to be positively and significantly related to Business Leadership Success (Effectiveness). Sadakah was found to have positive and significant relationship with Business Leadership Effectiveness. Therefore, H2 is accepted at (β = .27, p<.00). This highlights that the more Sadakah the leader provide to his subordinates the greater his Leadership Effectiveness. Similarly, Integrity was found to be positively and significantly predicting Business Leadership Effectiveness. This lends support for H3 and therefore it is accepted at (β = .49, p<.00). This result indicates that the higher the Integrity of the leader, the greater his Leadership Effectiveness. The same goes for Emotional Control where it was found to possess positive and significant association with Business Leadership Effectiveness. Thus, H4 is approved at (β = .14, p<05). On the other hand, Forgiveness was found to be negatively and significantly related to Business Leadership Effectiveness, therefore H5 is rejected at (β = -.11, p> 05). This indicates that omitting employees’ faults does not influence the effectiveness of leadership.
6. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This research was an empirical study to test the association between responsibility and leadership success (effectiveness) from a Quranic perspective. With the exclusion of Forgiveness, the rest factors of responsibility namely, Emotional Control, Sadakah and Integrity were found to be positively and significantly associated to business leadership success (effectiveness). The results represent that subordinates are more willing to follow the leader who is caring, helpful, honest and stable. Such traits and practices are considered the means by which business leaders can achieve and sustain organizational goals and growth.
According to Aquinoet al. (2003) and Stone (2002) Forgiveness is a contextual sensitive construct which means, its effects might be positive or negative depends on the context. Al-Tareeq (1997) indicated that Yemeni society is tribal societies which, consider revenge as a sign of manhood, because of that the negative relationship between Forgiveness and Leadership effectiveness might be due to Yemeni people view of forgiveness as weakness. Aquino et al. (2003) perceives Forgiveness to be beneficial in long-term relationships rather than in short term. This could plausibly account for the non-significant relationship in this study as 62% of the subordinates had only spent less than three years with the respective leaders.
| Funding: This study received no specific financial support. |
| Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests. |
| Contributors/Acknowledgement: All authors contributed equally to the conception and design of the study. |
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