Factors Influencing the Intention of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) Muslim Staffs to Perform Cash Waqf

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the role of religious compliance, knowledges of waqf, generosity, financial, service delivery and recommendation in influencing the intention of Universiti Sains Malaysia Muslim Staffs to perform cash waqf. Started in 2016, the Malaysian government has decided to reduce the funding allocated to public universities in Malaysia. This reduction is due to public universities high dependency on government funding in generating their income. Thus, a reduction of up to 30 percent of the normal allocation would have required public universities to find and generate their own financial resources. One of the recommended ways is through higher education waqf. Universiti Sains Malaysia only started the waqf fund in 2014 through the establishment of the USM Foundation. As USM is relatively new to higher education waqf funds, it is important to understand the factors that contribute to participation in the funds in order to further increase the fund collected. The paper is quantitative in nature and adopted survey research method to conduct the study. Questionnaire was distributed in USM Penang campus to collect the data. The analysis method involved inferential analysis using IBM SPSS version 22. The findings of the study showed generosity, service delivery, recommendation and knowledge of waqf influenced USM Muslim staff's intention to perform cash waqf. Therefore, in order to ensure the development of cash waqf funds in USM, these four factors need to be taken into account. However, this is just a preliminary study. It is proposed in the future that further studies can be done using other variables to understand the cash waqf giving behavior in USM.