THE EFFECT OF ISLAMIC RELIGIOSITY ON ETHICAL JUDGMENT OF MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING PROFESSIONALS IN SAUDI ARABIA: A BEHAVIORAL BUSINESS ETHICS APPROACH

Abstract

Researchers have consistently failed to capture how exactly religiosity affects ethical judgment and behaviors in organizations. The absence of clear links between religiosity and ethics might be due to methodological and conceptual limitations. Moreover, existing literature on religiosity focuses overwhelmingly on Western Christianity, and such studies on Islam are scarce, despite it being one of the world's fastest growing religions. The present thesis therefore addresses these gaps. Specifically, it examines how different Muslims' views of Allah might interact with other religious dimensions (practice, knowledge, affective dimensions) influencing Muslims' ethical judgments in various business situations. The aim was to build a theory and conduct an empirical investigation to test it.Accordingly, the first step was to build theory to understand the influence of religiosity in general and Islamic religiosity in particular, on ethical judgment behavior in organizations to guide the thesis's empirical examinations. Specifically, it developed an integrative faith-based model (IFBM) to capture the interaction and mechanism role of beliefs, experience, cognitive, biases and emotions incorporating the notion of the God Concept and God Image along with System 1 and System 2 of moral decision processes to develop categories guiding future business ethics research on religiosity. Second, in order to test IFBM, it was essential to develop the Scale of Muslim's view of Allah at work (SMVAW). In doing so, it conducted three preliminary focus groups and had the SMVAW's initial items reviewed by experts. It then pre-tested the SMVAW with a small convenience sample, applying a cognitive interviewing technique to refine it. The SMVAW was then administered online via a multi-stage Cluster Sampling (n = 472) of marketing and management professionals to verify its reliability and validity. The results showed that the newly-constructed scale had adequate psychometric properties. Third step, it empirically tested the proposed integrative faith-based model (IFBM) and examined how different Muslims' views of Allah, mediated by their religious practice and knowledge, influence their ethical judgments in organizations. The study comprising focus groups and vignette designs was carried out with a random sample of 427 marketing and management professionals from Saudi Arabia. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was utilized to test all of the study's hypotheses simultaneously. The main findings confirmed that Hope View might be more closely associated with unethical judgment in organizations, while the Fear View and more Balanced View were positively associated with the ethical judgment. Further, religious practice and knowledge mediate the relationship between Muslim marketing and management professionals' different views of Allah and ethical judgment. These results provide unique theoretical insight on religiosity's impact on ethical judgment and have important implications for management.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Saleema Kauser (Supervisor) & Marianna Fotaki (Supervisor)