The Influence of Islamic Work Ethic on Employees’ Responses Towards Organizational Change: An Empirical Investigation on Islamic Banks in Kuwait

Abstract

The corporate world today is highly competitive and in order for organizations to survive and remain competitive, they must constantly evolve through change. However, the majority of organizational changes neither result in successful implementation or foster sustained change. It is suggested that the success of changes are highly contingent on employees’ responses towards them. To this end, Islamic Work Ethic (IWE) has become a subject of growing interest amongst academia and human resource literature attempting to understand and predict employees’ responses towards organizational change, particularly in Muslim societies. Despite this, studies attempting to uncover IWE’s influence on characteristics of employees’ responses towards change have revealed varying outcomes. Thus, the nature of the relationship remains ambiguous. To tackle this gap, this study contributes to knowledge by developing a conceptual model that assists in identifying the influence of IWE on employees’ responses towards change in the shape of their commitment to change and organizational deviance behaviors. The testing of these relationships was carried out in the ever changing and developing Islamic banking industry within the Middle Eastern context of Kuwait. Through a quantitative case-study approach, data was collected from 398 branch-level employees via questionnaires. The outcomes revealed that the extent of IWE’s influence on employee commitment to change varied greatly across different components (affective, normative and continuance). On the other hand, IWE was found to negatively influence employee engagement in organizational deviance towards change. Due to such findings, several theoretical implications, practical recommendations and future research directions are put forward.