The effect of corporate governance structure on corporate social and financial performance of Malaysian Islamic Banks

Abstract

Social responsibility is incumbent in the foundation of corporate governance of Islamic banks (IBs) and positioned as one of the bank’s objective world widely. This research uses stakeholder and agency theories in search of empirical evidences on the achievement of the social objective in Malaysian Islamic banks. It investigates the issue via a questionnaire survey and content analysis of the IBs’ annual reports. The survey is carried out with 152 IBs managers aimed to gain insight on the important corporate social performance (CSP) indicators and salient stakeholder groups from the managers’ perspective. In general, Islamic bank managers perceived that there were 47 important CSP indicators while different stakeholder interest groups were significantly different in salience for CSP consideration. New stakeholder groups, the government, investment account holder and Zakat were recognized in Islamic banking with the government interest group being the most salient. The content analysis aimed to gauge the actual CSP’s /achievement) for various stakeholder interest groups of 11 IBs in Malaysia from 2003 to 2008 and to examine the relationship and effect of corporate governance structures with CSP and the banks’ performance. CSP (scored based on the presence of the CSP indicators in the banks’ annual report weighted by its perceived importance) in IBs was still marginally low with an average of 52% of the expected performance. Controlling the cultural and national differences, this study found significant improvement in CSP particularly in 2007 and 2008 (years after the issuance of CSR framework for public listed companies (2006) and after the issuance of specific Code of Corporate Governance for Islamic Financial Institutions in Malaysia (2005). However, the significant improvement was neither across all stakeholder groups nor across the time series. CSP in the full-fledged IBs (FFIB) was inactive compared to the Islamic subsidiary banks (ISB). Though generally the CSP in IBs was not encouraging, EGLS regression analysis empirically provided evidences that the board structures particularly the board size and Shari’ah governance structures (size and roles) were significant factors to the banks’ CSP (social functions). Only Government ownership (GOwn) had significant effect to ROA while the size of Shariah Committee (ScSize) and the concentrated ownership (IOWN) had significant effect to Tobin Q. Though general analysis found that CG had significant effect on CSP and CSP had significant effect on financial performance, Barron and Kenny (1985) mediating test procedure found that CSP was not a mediating variable in the CG and financial performance relationship.