Impact of Islam on socially responsible and ethical behaviour in Middle Eastern organisations

Abstract

Despite numerous publications on the role of religion on individual and organisational ethical behaviour, academic literature seems to lack a comprehensive understanding of how religion affects the moral reasoning, decision-making and ethical behaviour of organisations. This gap seems to be even more significant with regard to developing countries. By conducting twenty-two interviews with executives and top managers from the private and public sectors and using Grounded Theory approach for data analysis we identified how Islamic moral postulates and ethics impact on individual-level moral and ethical behaviour and thus moral reasoning, decision-making and ethical organisational behaviour. We contribute to the literature by identifying that the repetitive interactions of social actors with religious affiliations create behavioural expectations in the form of religious duties and that these behavioural expectations and religious duties, when repeated and consequently internalized, become a constituent part of the person’s identity and determine how the individual interacts with the surrounding environment. Driven by intrinsic religious motivation, the religious self affects organisational behaviour. We also add to literature by identifying how individual-level ‘ethical behaviour’ and ‘character’ translate to organisational-level ethical operations by providing empirical evidence for the impact of religion on individual-level ethical decision-making.