Identifying the principles and components of the moral leadership inspired from Nahj al-Balaghah

Research on the moral qualities of leaders has continued for many years. According to the literature review, leaders are distinguished from non-leaders by the attributes such as intelligence, dominance, adaptability, perseverance, integrity, socioeconomic status, and self-confidence. In the contemporary age, even though various models and theories of leadership have been proposed, most of these theories are focused only on the general aspects of leadership and have neglected to inspectorate and analyzing the principles and building blocks of the moral-based leadership approach. The purpose of this study is to identify the salient features and principles of moral leadership using the content of the Nahj al-Balaghah.

Evaluating the importance of the extracted principles, we use the Qualitative Data theory approach as an evaluation metric.

As a result, by reviewing and analyzing the Nahj al-Balaghah, about 149 basic concepts of moral leadership were extracted, next, 58 sub-categories were identified using Axial Coding.

by Selective Coding, other 11 main categories are identified. These main categories are Organizational Culture, Principles of Sovereignty and Moral Values, Ethical Competence, Meritocracy, Transparency and Accountability, Determination and Service-orientation, Rule-of-the-law-orientation, Citizenship Ethics, Justice, Non-authoritarianism, and Moral and Behavioral Oversight.