Religionand Business Leadership: An Empirical Research Review

To understand an important role that religion plays and influences the entire scope of human societies including ethical and organizational systems and particularly leadership which is very scant, this paper aims to discuss review of empirical researches conducted to understand interconnection between leader/leadership and religion to know whether religion plays any role in influencing leader and their leadership approach and to what extent and which aspect. With available literature, review has been into two parts: First, among students about their perception towards leadership ability and second, among organizational leader. The finding shows that those who perceive themselves more religious have stronger perception about their leadership ability and religion is found to be an important factor influencing organizational leader in their leadership approach specially in decision making and Islamic leaders are found to have stronger influence of their religion on their leadership practices. Thus research finding points out the points to the fact that very scant literature is available to understand leadership approach from lens of religious influences. To have better understanding of the interconnection between religion and leadership approach we require to add more empirical evidences for the given subject and also these researches are conducted majorly for Christian denomination and at international level only. So it would interesting to study religion and leadership approach in Indian context as well as in other religious denomination specifically Islam to understand role and importance of religion on leadership approach.