Islamic Leadership, Citizenship Behaviour and Work Ethics: The Roots of Academic Performance

Abstract

The performance of academics is a crucial aspect of the quality of educational programs in higher education. Thus, more revisions are increasingly essential to bring out the vital dimensions that can help to sustain innovative academic performance. Numerous research outcomes suggest innumerable variables, but interestingly relevant for the Islamic universities context is that Islamic leadership competencies significantly influence employee performance. Most of the studies emphasised encouraging results for leadership from the Islamic tenets on employees’ multi-dimensional performance, but in other industries than higher education institutions. Thus, it is significant to review the properties of focused Islamic leadership on academic performance in Islamic universities, as scholars also recommend. This paper is incline to reconfirm organizational citizenship behavior from the Islamic perspective in connection with Islamic leadership and various contemporary performance measures of academics at higher education institutions. These are not documented well in the existing knowledge frame, particularly within Social Exchange Theory. In addition, this paper establishes the association of Islamic work ethic, leadership following the tenets of Islam, and task and contextual performances. It has become an issue that has fascinated the courtesy of numerous worldwide scholars and researchers. However, thru the literature review, only a few studies focused on cross-cultural and Islamic perspectives. Therefore, it is timely to examine leadership, work ethics and organisational citizenship behaviour from Islamic viewpoints that can affect lecturers’ academic performance, such as teaching, research, and service performance. This paper proposed several empirical research suggestions to address the theoretical gaps and reconfirm the previous studies’ findings.