Reputation, Competitive Advantage and Financial Performance of Infaq Received Among Private Islamic Schools in Malaysia

Abstract

To sustain a competitive advantage, organisations should procure resources and use it towards this objective, which would ultimately lead to superior performance. Academics and business professionals consider the most valuable resources of an organisation are good reputation. Performance of infaq receive by private Islamic schools is closely related to the donating behaviour of the donors. In today’s highly competitive and resource-scarce environment, the private Islamic schools as non-profit organisations must create a positive image and reputation to gain the public's favour and trust and consequently, more donations. As the number of private Islamic schools increased yearly, each school needs to identify its competitive advantage in order to be more attractive in the eye of the stakeholders. Using a cross sectional survey design, this study intended to explore the relationship of reputation and competitive advantage to the financial performance of infaq received by private Islamic schools in Malaysia. The SmartPLS (v. 3.2.9) software was used to run the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique and the findings showed that the competitive advantage is influenced by reputation, however the competitive advantage does not lead to superior performance of infaq received by private Islamic schools in Malaysia. It is hoped that future studies focus on separate studies involving pondok institution, tahfiz schools as well as SRI and SMI to obtain more comprehensive results.