مفهوم سازی مدل شخصیت اسلامی Conceptualizing the Islamic Personality Model

Recently, Malaysia has undergone a tremendous development in various areas namely, manufacturing, agriculture, retail and business, and banking and other types of services. The development has triggered the concerted efforts to further improve these areas by formulating the 12 NKREA. One of the 12 NKREA is on the educational transformation. The main focus is on the enhancement of Human Capital in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies or abilities so that the human capital can contribute more effectively and efficiently to the development of our economy and the country as a whole. The process of enhancing the human capital cannot be effectively done without the availability of the right tools to measure its traits, abilities and competencies. To date, there are a lot of existing measures of personality traits. However, they are lacking of one most crucial element of generalization; consistently measuring the construct across various populations. Some studies especially those conducted in Asia countries that adapted these existing measures failed to obtain a clear structure of the construct when conducting a factor analysis (Karim, Zamzuri & Nor, 2009; Mohd Yusoff, Othman & Othman, 2013). The most probable reason for the occurrence is the cultural or values incompatibility. The most popular study on cultural discrepancies was conducted by Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) involving five cultural dimensions of individualism-collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity-femininity, long termshort term orientation, and indulgence-restraint. He found that Malaysia scored low on individualism and high on power distance as compared to the US. However, if the comparison is made among the Islamic countries (i.e., Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iraq and Bangladesh), the scores are quite similar. The findings of the study indicate that citizens of Islamic countries share similar cultural values that vary significantly with those of the Western countries. Due to different cultural orientations or values, there is an urgent need to develop a specific model of Islamic Personality that can be reliably used to describe the individual Muslim personality traits. The proposed research is also intended to develop a measure that can be applied to discriminate individuals into different groups which have varying psychological, affective and behavioral consequences. This measure will be validated using construct, concurrent, convergent and divergent validities.