Private equity investing (PE) has experienced a rapid growth on a global scale over the past several decades and has become a significant industry. But while scholars have devoted considerable effort to studying the area of risk capital investing into businesses, research about private equity as an asset class is surprisingly scarce. The aim of this research is to provide a deeper understanding about how differences in organizational characteristics may affect institutional investors’ motives for investing in private equity including Islamic private equity, ways of working, satisfaction with investment performances, and their respective choices of investment strategies for both conventional as well as Islamic private equity. In order to provide a rich and comprehensive understanding of Institutional Investors’ opinions and perceptions, a qualitative study was undertaken based on in-depth interviews with institutional PE fund investors in Malaysia. Based on a comprehensive set of interviews with PE fund investors, in-depth insights about variances in motives for investing in the asset class, ways of working, and investment strategies were acquired. One of the more interesting findings from this study is that there seem to be two significantly divergent investment strategies that lead to satisfactory performances when investing in PE funds: (i) to be a devoted, highly skilled and independent investor, or (ii) to copy the behaviors and decisions of other investors who are perceived as having high skills and thus have attained prominence in the market. This, in turn, suggests that organization-specific characteristics determine which strategy will be the optimal choice for a certain investor.

Private equity including Islamic private equity gained considerable attention over the last few decades. The focus on private equity's portfolio capabilities within existing literature is very limited. This has been one of the main motivational factors to the research on private equity's portfolio capabilities. The paper contributes towards deep understanding of differences between Islamic and conventional private equity with a focus on behavior of Malaysia investors while investing in private equity.