Empirical Linkage of Intellectual Capital and Performance of Islamic Banks

With the eminence of the era of knowledge-based economies, the concept of intellectual capital (IC) is of vital importance for organisations to survive in these vigorous environments. As one of the knowledge intensive sectors, there is no exception to banking institutions in enhancing their intellectual capital efficiency to the forefront especially for Islamic banks (IBs) that have to compete with the firmly-established conventional banks. Accordingly, this study intends to measure the relationship between intellectual capital efficiency and banks’ performance. In total, 59 Islamic banks are selected and their audited annual reports are compiled from the banks’ websites respectively from year 2006-2017. Value-added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) are applied in measuring IC efficiency. The findings provide empirical evidences of positive relationship between IC efficiency and banks performance, nonetheless, when decomposes into human capital efficiency (HCE), structural capital efficiency (SCE) and capital employed efficiency (CEE), only human capital efficiency shows significant positive relationship with performance of the banks while the other two components show significant negative linkage with bank performance. Furthermore, due to criticisms towards VAIC method, this study using modified value-added intellectual capital coefficient (MVAIC) and found that MVAIC has significant positive relationship with bank performance while relational capital as additional variable in MVAIC regression model has no significant effect with bank performance. This study provides better insights on the importance of utilisation of IC by banking institutions particularly for Islamic banks.