The Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence, Islamic Work Ethic and Leadership Practices Among Middle Level Administrators in Malaysian Public Universities

The main challenges for the higher education institutions are to ensure academic programs provided are market driven and sensitively able to respond to the changing need of various economic sectors. Thus, higher education needs to function as an effective institution. No doubt, the recent challenges require the key personnel to equip themselves with leadership quality in order to achieve organizational goals. Previous studies have shown that effective leadership was influenced by several factors such as emotional intelligence. Another significant issue in leadership is ethical behaviors. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership practices when Islamic work ethic is practiced in Malaysian public universities. The respondents consisted of middle level administrators in
Malaysian public universities throughout the country. Using a structured questionnaire, a total of 500 surveys were distributed to the randomly selected respondents. A total of 237 (47.7% response rate) usable questionnaires were obtained. Several hypotheses were developed and investigated with multiple regression and hierarchical regression analyses. The results demonstrated that only the dimension of managing own and other emotion was significantly related to leadership practices. While, Islamic work ethic found to negatively significant moderate the relationship between the appraisal of emotion and leadership practices. The results revealed that the explanatory power of the model increased from 28.6% to 46.4% when Islamic work ethic moderates the relationship. Appraisal of emotion influence on leadership practices will be weaker when Islamic work ethic is high. Several plausible reasons were discussed. The findings have some contributions both to the practical and theoretical implications. Understanding of these factors can lead to better planning and implementation of leadership development in public higher education sector. Several recommendations were made for future research.