This paper presents a study to determine demand for electricity in city of Yazd, Iran over the period of 1998-2008. Using vector error correction model (VECM) based on seasonal information, the study determines that electricity has no elasticity in short term in household expenditure. Therefore, government policy on increasing price of electricity will not influence demand. However, electricity maintains elasticity over the long-term period and an increase on price of electricity could motivate consumers to reduce their consumption by purchasing energy efficient facilities. Therefore, any governmental strategy to increase price may have positive impact on economy. The study also detects a positive and meaningful relationship between temperature and electricity consumption.

This study investigates the relationship between organizational culture and productivity in one of Iranian Gas distribution companies. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 78 out of 120 managers who worked for this organization. The study uses correlation ratio to examine the relationship between different components of the survey. The results of our survey indicate that there were positive and meaningful relationship between organizational culture and productivity where Spearman and Pearson correlations between these two components were 0.637 and 0.635 with P & LT; 0.01. In addition, the study has found some positive and meaningful relationship between different components of organizational culture and productivity; namely creativity, accepting risk, support, integration, control, identification and reward policy and communication.

A healthy and good work condition is often involved with other factors such as leadership style, management, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study the effects of the quality of work life on job satisfaction. The study uses a standard questionnaire and distributes it among all 86 full time employees of two governmental agencies in Iran, Supreme Audit Court and Interior Ministry, and Cronbach alphas has been calculated as 0.92. The main hypothesis of this survey considers the relationship between job satisfaction and quality of work life and there. There are also eleven sub-hypotheses associated with this survey including fair and sufficient payment, safe and healthy work conditions, equal job opportunities, rule of law, service training, integration and social cohesion, human development capabilities, organizational structure, delegation of authority, job satisfaction and employee participation. The results of survey have confirmed that there were some meaningful relationships between the quality of work life on job satisfaction in both organizations.

In this paper, we study the impact of leadership style among middle level managers of Iran Khodro, the biggest Iranian automaker, to promote innovation among regular workers. The proposed study designed a questionnaire and distributed it among middle level managers of this auto-maker. The study uses t-student test to examine the relationship between leadership behavior components and innovation and Freedman test is employed to rank the effects. The results of t-student values indicate that all leadership behavior of middle level have positive influence on innovation and Freedman test implied that stimulating knowledge diffusion was number one priority followed by intellectual stimulation and innovative role-modeling. We have also performed multi-regression analysis and the results have indicated that there were some positive relationship between leadership components and innovation.

This paper presents an empirical survey on understanding the content validity and reliability of technology acceptance measurement (TAM) among 278 university professors who worked for university of Shahid Beheshti located in city of Tehran Iran. We use a questionnaire consists of 37 different questions in five categories including perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude towards the use of technology and operating plan in Likert scale. The proposed study uses first-order confirmatory factor analysis for validity of the questionnaire and Cronbach alpha is employed for measuring the reliability of the questionnaire. The results have confirmed that TAM questionnaire maintains sufficient content validity and reliability. In other words, The measures were refined and stream-lined, resulting in two six-item scales with reliabilities of 0.89 for usefulness and 0.87 for ease of use.

One of the most important issues on construction projects is to make sure that the project is completed on time. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to verify the effects of four factors namely procedures, technical factors, financial strength and domestic affairs on creating delay on completion of projects. The study uses two measures of Pearson and Spearman correlation tests to examine all hypotheses of the survey. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 40 experts chosen from managers and specialist in railroad construction projects in Iran. The results have confirmed that all four factors influence on creating possible delay on such project, significantly.

Leadership is one of the most important components of management in any business unit. An organization with good leadership tends to have a better chance to survive in todays’ competitive environment. This paper considers the effects of leadership style on innovation in one of the biggest automakers in Iran named Iran Khodro. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among a sample of 278 regular employees and 61 middle level managers of this firm. The results of the survey indicate that there is a meaningful difference between leadership style and standard leadership style among middle level managers when the level of significance is five percent. In addition, there is a meaningful difference between innovation and its components with standards among regular employees. Finally, leadership has positive and meaningful impact on employees’ innovation.

Measuring the relative performance of universities play important role on better educational planning. During the past few years, balanced scorecard (BSC) has become popular among researchers as a technique for measuring the performance of business units. This method studies a particular firm in terms of four different perspectives including internal processes, learning and growth, customer and financial figures. One primary concern on using such method is that this method does not consider the relative importance of these components. In this paper, we present a hybrid of BSC with analytical network process to measure the relative performance of an educational unit in Iran.