Prophet Characters: Benchmark for Code of Ethics for Directors

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the director's work ethics particularly on Islamic perspectives and prophetic character towards sustaining the performance of the Islamic business organisations. The paper highlights the corporate scandals that occurred in Malaysia. Then, it examines and reviews prior studies on directors' work ethics, ethics from religious viewpoint and Islamic work ethics. Next, it also discusses the directors' work ethics based on prophetic characters and present a theoretical framework for directors' work ethics that applicable in modern business activities. The proposed theoretical framework contains four fundamental characters of directors which are siddiq (truthfulness), fatanah (intelligent), tabligh (deliver) and amanah (trustworhtiness). This framework is hoped to increase the integrity and moral behaviours of the directors and eventually preventing them from involve in various unethical conduct especially in business activities that will tarnish the economic development and growth of a country.