Jamilah Othman

Asian women in top management: eight country cases

This article is a by-product of an innovative session of the 2014 Asia Chapter of the Academy of Human Resource Development conference, Seoul, South Korea, where eight female researchers with roots in eight Asian countries (in alphabetical order: China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Thailand) presented on the topic of Asian women in top management. In this article, we present these presenters’ perspectives on the topic, including their current state of working conditions and balancing of personal and professional lives. We asked them the following three questions: (1) Do traditional values/religious beliefs limit or liberate women in management? (2) How have social views on the role of women in management changed in your country? (3) What organizational and social changes are necessary for women to advance to leadership positions? We also encouraged them to go beyond answering these three questions. Additionally, we discuss convergence (commonalities) and divergence (differences) across these eight Asian countries.

Unwanted and Unwelcome: Sexual Harassment in the Malaysian Workplace

While sexual harassment in the workplace has been recognized as a serious misconduct in the West since the 1980s, it has only been recently acknowledged in the Asian region. Research in the Malaysi...

Impact of Islamic Values on the Leadership Style of Muslim Women Academics in Malaysia

The Problem The religious background of Muslim women academic leaders in Malaysia guides them in performing demanding roles in managing multiple responsibilities. To date, little is known about the impact of Islamic values on Muslim women leaders in institutions of higher learning, even though Islam is the official religion in Malaysia. In addition, the field of human resource development has done little to explore the leadership style of Muslim women. The Solution This paper presents findings and recommendations of a research conducted for the purpose of exploring, understanding, and presenting the impact of Islamic values on the leadership style of Muslim women academics in Malaysia. This inquiry is significant because it’s open the new sight for HRD scholar and practitioners to explore HRD in a leadership, women leadership, religious, and the role of Muslim faith in women academic leaders. It is hoped that the findings of this research will encourage HRD scholars and practitioners to consider integrated dimension to their scholarly thought and practice related to leadership style. The Stakeholders The outcomes of this research will be of interest to those women who are currently in leadership roles in academia, as well as those women interested in moving into these roles. It should also be of interest to higher education administrators and, particularly, those within higher education charged with developing leaders. Human resource development scholars and practitioners will also benefit from the contributions of this article to our general understanding of women in leadership roles.

The role of physical and financial, social, human and natural capitals in explaining work performance of employees in Malaysian public sector

In this paper, we investigated the influence of four basic types of capital: physical and financial, social, human, and natural on work performance of the employees in public sector at federal ministry level in Malaysia. A structured research instrument was utilized to survey a sample of 1253 employees from 19 federal ministries in Malaysia. Pearson correlation was employed to analyze the relationships between the independent variables and dependent variable. Enter method regression was employed to determine to what extent these capital factors explain the variation of work performance among employees. Analysis shows that there are positive linear relationships between the four capitals and work performance. Only three of the four capitals considered in the regression model namely human, social, and physical and financial capitals were significant in explaining the variation of work performance. Natural capital did not show significant contribution. Human capital made the highest contribution in explaining variation of work performance, followed by the three nonhuman capitals: social, and physical and financial capitals. Natural capital made an insignificant contribution.