Business Leadership and Religion in Islam

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Religion as an institution often characterized as a unified system of beliefs combining various theologies, creeds, doctrines about people's current and eternal destiny as well as people's relationships with themselves and others around them including friends, enemies and God (Durkheim, 1912, Spencer 1862). The teaching of most of religion have general or detailed rule and frameworks for different aspect of the adherents' lives. Besides rules and teachings, religion as an informal institution in any society, directly or indirectly plays a role in shaping the individual attitudes, values and beliefs systems and behaviour's at large, and this remains true for business organizations too as the concepts and issues of spirituality and religiosity in the work place start to appear and discussed more frequently in the literature. Leaders as well as organizations are looking for meaning and higher purpose that brought spirituality, religion and faith to the world of business (Kouzes & Posner, 2002). The success of any organization largely depends on the leadership approach and leader's behaviour. Since 1900's from trait leadership till date, many leadership study, articles, books and researches have been published. However, most of the discussions on leadership is based on Western perspective. Jogulu and Wood (2008) questioned the universality of Western leadership models, theories and research and cautioned against generalizing findings in a cross-cultural context because different cultures exhibit varying leadership practices and management styles (Jogulu & Wood, 2010). Thus, the present study examines leadership from an Islamic perspective to understand leadership from Islamic cultural dimension and add to the existing leadership literature which has so far being neglected.