Experiences of developed countries and various studies in the context of economic growth of developing countries have shown that economic growth is not only explained by physical capital and labor force but also, and more importantly, by human capital. The later variable should be entered, as a major determinant, in the endogenous growth model. With the concern of important role of human capital in this research, the primary objective of this paper is to explore the effect of gender discrimination of human capital on economic growth and factor productivity in Iran and the selected OECD countries. More specifically, to indicate the economic capability of educated females, we use data of the considered countries over the period 1974-2008, to estimate the relevant models of growth and productivity. The implication is to compare the empirical results obtained for Iran and the selected developed countries.

Culture is the soul of an organization, which can cause advance or retrogress of the organization. This paper investigates the role of organizational culture on improvement and effectiveness of organizations. We identify and recognize the role of important components of organizational culture in effectiveness of professional ethics within organizations. The results show that there was a meaningful relationship between organizational interest and commitment, enhancement of stability and compatibility, teamwork moral, giving identity to the staff and the quality of professional ethics. The results obtained from the data analysis also indicate that organizational culture deeply affects the employees & apos; behavior of an organization.

Productivity improvement plays essential role on cost reduction and production planning in many organizations. There are literally various methods for measuring productivity and improving systems’ capabilities such as total quality management, 5S, etc. In this paper, we perform an empirical investigation to find out whether implementing 5S could reduce interruptions in production systems in one of pipe and profile manufacturing units located in province of Semnan, Iran. The proposed study compares the mean and standard deviations of waste materials before and after the implementation of 5-S in three different lines and statistical tests indicate that 5-S have made the necessary change on production planning and it could reduce waste materials, significantly.

One of the important issues in port services is to evaluate the performance of the services. Without evaluating port services and their related components, these services cannot be considered desirable and its quality cannot be enhanced. However, the evaluation and the quality assurance of port services should be accomplished based on a scientific framework and a coherent framework to have desirable results. The importance-performance analysis model is an appropriate framework where each component is evaluated in terms of two dimensions of importance and performance. This study performs performance-importance analysis of ports’ services quality form perspective of containerized liner shipping in the Imam Khomeini port. In this exploratory study, 150 shipping lines experts are chosen, randomly in 2012. The study identifies 28 components of quality in port services and shipping lines’ experts are requested to evaluate these components in terms of two dimensions of importance and performance. Results reveal that there is a gap between the importance and performance of all port services components except three components of 6, 19 and 24. In addition, the results indicate that Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) model is capable of evaluating and assuring quality in port services and can precisely identify the strengths and weaknesses of the seaport system and provide guidance for strategy formulation for quality improvement.

This paper considers different approaches for establishment of change management in governmental agencies. The proposed model of this paper uses Kotter’s 8-step method in an empirical investigation for a gas distribution firm located in province of Esfahan, Iran. The results of this study reveal that the organization was successful to create sense of urgency, form a powerful coalition, create a vision for change, communicate the vision, create short-term wins and build on the change. However, the organization was not successful on removing obstacles and changes in corporate culture. In addition, the sixth step, create short -term wins, receives the highest rate of success while removing the obstacles maintains the minimum rate of success. Finally, the survey demonstrates that gender and educational background do not have any impact on change management but age, job experience as well as job position influences change management, significantly.


DOI: 10.5267/j.msl.2013.05.007
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This performs an empirical investigation to evaluate the relationship between cultural values and earnings quality in some Iranian banks over the period 2005-2011. The individualism, uncertainty avoidance, power distance and masculinity dimensions are regarded as criteria for cultural values. The study also considers change in return on assets and loan loss provisions as the main criteria for earnings quality of banks. For measuring the cultural values, the questionnaire of Hofstede [Hofstede, G. (1994). The business of international business is culture. International business review, 3(1), 1-14.]. The study also uses two measures to calculate earnings quality: 1-just-meet-or-beat the prior year’s earnings and 2- Income smoothing through loan loss provisions based on compound linear regression. Research results showed that there was a weak relationship between cultural values and earnings management.

Having appropriate technology is an important managerial decision in today’s manufacturing industry and to choose a good technology, we need to consider various alternatives. In other words, when we intend to purchase a technology, we need to go beyond price as a primary criterion and look for other important factors such as technical support, quality, powers, etc. In this paper, we present two methods including preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to rank different manufacturing facilities based on various criteria including price, weight, power, etc. and analyze the results. The proposed study of this paper considers six criteria including price, weight, power, spindle, diameter and stroke for selection of a manufacturing equipment. The results of our survey have shown that diameter and weight are number priority for ranking different alternatives.

This study analyzes the determinants of non audit-fees for a sample of 67 French companies belonging to the SBF 120 index during the period 2005-2007. Our attention focused on the influence of shareholder / creditor agency costs - namely debts and investment opportunities. Based on panel regression methodology, our results reveal that the affiliation of the auditor to an international network, the presence of an audit committee, the debt, the size of the company and the closing date have an effect on non-audit fees. However, investment opportunities do not affect the amount of non-audit fees.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to detect important factors influencing on electronic banking adoption using factor analysis. The proposed study designed a questionnaire, distributed among 210 customers who were regular customers of four banks in city of Tehran, Iran named Saderat, Eghtesad Novin, Melli and Mellat. The questionnaire consists of 42 questions and since factor analysis is sensitive on skewness of data, we have decided to remove some of the questions and summarize it into 17 questions. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.80, which is well above the minimum acceptable limit and validates the results. The results of our survey indicate that four major factors including consistency, facilities, cost control and feasibility.

Human resources are considered as one of the key components of any organization to reach its objectives. Human resources help organization performance doing organizational duties and making employees’ improvement. Because of this, employee performance appraisal has changed to one of the most important issues for top managers. Performance appraisal is necessary to select useful strategies for increasing productivity of human resource management along with productivity of employee to get strategic targets. In this study, we extract effective factors on increasing of employee performance and subsequently, present some suggestions to managers of academic organizations. The study was performed on some employees who worked for Islamic Azad University in 2013. Cronbach alpha was equal to 99.4% for employee performance appraisal, which confirmed the overall survey. To recognize key factors we used path analysis technique too. The results of the study revealed that in this school, employee performance in practical field was higher than expected, but in terms of operational and behavioral fields, they were in the middle stage.


DOI: 10.5267/j.msl.2013.05.002
Keywords: