Islamic culture generates affective commitment in workforce

Islamic civilization was fundamentally established in sixth century throughout the first revelation received by Muhammad PBUH. With the God’s (Allah SWT) instructions, Islamic teaching is applied not only for worshipping aspects but also throughout humanity aspects including from waking up in the morning until sleeping in the evening. This ethical process also has been applied in working area to produce reliable commitment. But how it works?

Islamic teaching written in Quran suggests us to work in commitment to get optimum results
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Muhammad PBUH was an example for moslem in conducting the life. Basically, there are four characteristics that the prophet taught which are Shiddiq, Amanah, Fathanah and Tabligh. Respectively, they mean honesty, trustworthy, intellectual, and integrity. These four characteristics are the fundamental aspects for people in establishing or interacting in the society, particularly in the job.

Being employed by the employer, the person must show good and strong characteristics. Currently, people consider it only by showing the soft skills that they owned such as public speaking, good communication, able in working in team within under pressure situation and leadership. However, those are unreliable since psychologically speaking, people are able to change their behavior in temporal condition. Generally speaking, lying and untrustworthy could happen if people demands something.

Therefore, Islamic teaching taught people the fundamental characteristics of life. In avoiding the misbehave, Islam taught people to act honestly, can be trusted, being intellect and have integrity.

How Islamic culture can be applied in workforce

Some people argue that the Islamic culture is dangerous because some of the laws or sharia are not accepted by the others cultures. Others people may suggest that it is because we have different culture. But, in writer’s opinion the debatable aspects happening because of the knowledge. For instance, in workforce, many organizations have turned into bankruptcy because of corruptions. This crisis is the ethical issues when people do not understand about the honesty, integrity and trustworthy.

According to (Sharbatoghlie, Mosleh, & Shokatian, 2013) suggested that the transparency in financial aspect can be avoided by experiencing the ethical business among the employees. The reason lies on the transparency is because of the Islamic teaching. Islam work ethics is conducted by putting the concept of the faith in Allah SWT so the employees will consider the works as part of the praying or worshipping (Salahudin, Baharuddin, Abdullah, & Osman, 2016). As part of the praying, the truth must be obeyed and followed while the bad things must be avoided.

The commitment lying within the mindset of the workers is based on the understanding of Islamic teaching about Islamic law. (Salahudin, Baharuddin, Abdullah, & Osman, 2016) performed study in small enterprise in Malaysia in 2011 to understand the commitment happened among the workers. There were three locations in performing the study so it involved almost 300 thousands of workers in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur, and Johor. According to the paper, that workers show greater loyalty when they utilized the Islamic work ethics by strengthening the emotional bonds and helping each other.

Basic Islamic teaching about working

In Islamic teaching, working is considered as one of the part of independent life in term of being caliph in the world based on Koran 2:30. This also means that as human, we must establish the interaction between each other so the emotional bonds can be attached. Therefore, as one of the basic fundament of Islamic teaching is fasting which is conducted to understand the feel of poor, human is obliged to contribute in the society. This process will lead people to understand about themselves and have strong characteristics for truthful.

References
[1] Salahudin, S. N., Baharuddin, S. S., Abdullah, M. F., & Osman, A. (2016). The effect of islamic work ethics on organizational commitment. Procedia Economics and Finance 35, 582-590.
[2] Sharbatoghlie, A., Mosleh, M., & Shokatian, T. (2013). Exploring trends in the codes of ethics of the fortune 100 and global 100 corporations. Journal of Management Development 32 (7), 675-689.