An Islamic Model of Meritocracy to Resolve Meritocracy Challenges in Iranian Public Administration

Establishin meritocracy in organizations, causes job satisfaction, blossoming talent, staff loyalty and commitment to work and organization. Considering Islamic teachings can steer the society to remove abnormalities caused by lack of justice in organizations and establish an efficient system based on meritocracy. The goal of thisstudy isresolveing meritocracy challenges in governmental agencies with the help of Islamic teachings. In this study, components of meritocracy model were extracted from authentic religious texts. Then, the Delphi method was performed to obtain comments from the experts and challenges of meritocracy in government departments were identified. Then a field study was conducted in governmental offices of Tehran as a statistical population to understand the level of influence of each component of Islamic meritocracy model in eliminating challenges. For testing hypotheses, Binominal test and Friedman test was used. Finally, based on priority of indicators in four areas of meritocracy, named as meritocracy culture, recruiting and hiring qualified work forces, training and development competent staff and performance management of deserve forces; some strategies were recommended to overcome challenges, relying on the lessons of Islam.