"A Bird Flying in Spiritual Sky between Love, Fear and Hope"

Abstract

The widespread emergence of ethical failures in business has promoted interest in behavioural ethics. This emerging approach gives attention to individual actual behaviour to understand how to manage unethical behaviours in organisations. Ethics are clearly one aspect of modern business where the impact of religion has been shown to be significant. In this regard, many descriptive studies use a behavioural business ethics approach to examine the influence of religiosity on individual ethical behaviour in the workplace. However, the overwhelming majority of these studies linked Western Christianity to individual ethical behaviour while studies that focus on Islam are lacking. A critical reason behind this gap in the literature might be the necessity for comprehensive understanding of the Islamic faith and ethical system in order to identify and incorporate religious role expectations that constitute Muslim self-identity. Such a task is associated with difficulties as it engages the business researcher in the unfamiliar territory of Islamic theological and cultural literature in addition to the business ethics literature. This paper engages in such a task to provide a faith-based framework to be a solid foundation for empirical support within the realm of business. Moreover, it identifies potential future empirical research that would be facilitated by our conceptual framework. Keywords: Tawheed; Iman; ethical decision-making; Balanced view; Hope view; Fear view; Love view; Symbolic interactionist theory.