The recent advances on information technology have made tremendous change on traditional banking. These days, people do not carry cash and prefer to use electronic devices such as point of sale system (POS) or PIN entry devices (PinPad) to do desirable transactions. These technologies could facilitate e-business and increase profitability in various industries including banking sector. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of five new products namely ATM, POS Machines, PinPad machines, online and swift branches on banking performance indicators including return on assets (ROA), return on equities (ROE) and operating investment return (OIR). We use the information of 19 private and governmental banks, which were active in Iran over the period of 2005-2010. The study uses linear regression analysis as well as VAR technique to study the effects of the independent variables on bank performance indicators. The results indicate that while there are some weak and positive relationships between three technology indicators including POS, PinPad and online businesses and ROA as well as ROE, there is relatively strong and positive relationship between these three independent variables and OIR. In addition, while the results of VAR analysis have shown that any reduction on PinPad will reduce OIR but this reduction will disappear after approximately four periods.

This paper presents an empirical survey on the performance of physical education programs among elementary schoolchildren in city of Esfahan, Iran over the period 2010-2011. The study selects 18 non-for-profit and 34 governmental schools as samples and performs an empirical investigation on various personal characteristics of teachers in two different schools. The study investigates whether there is any difference between teachers’ age, education, area of education, having any coach, referee certificate and in-service courses in two types of non-for-profit and governmental schools. The results of our investigation show that physical education has a somewhat better quality in non-for-profit educational system compared with governmental ones but this difference is not statistically significance (P & LT; 0.05) in most cases except the cases of age and educational background.

Knowledge management plays an essential role on developing efficient systems in educational systems. However, there are different factors influencing the success of knowledge management. In this paper, we review recent advances on implementation of knowledge management (KM) in different areas and discuss why some of KM implementations fail and how they could turn to a successful one. The review focus more on recently published papers in different perspective from the implementation of KM in educational units to KM implementation on project management field.

Knowledge creation and innovation are primary competitive advantage in the modern economy. Social capital, on the other hand, is one the most important components of organizations, which could help share knowledge within organization and create competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on knowledge creation in petrochemical industry. The survey designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts who worked for petrochemical industry. The study investigates the impact of social capital in terms of three components of cognitive, relational and structural capitals on knowledge creation. Cronbach alpha in combined form is calculated as 0.79, which validates the overall survey. Structural equation modeling has been used to examine the proposed study and the results have confirmed that all three items positively influence knowledge creation, significantly.

Academic failure is one of the most important issues in educational systems and there are several attempts held to prevent such issues. In this paper, we study the relationship between school connection and academic failure among some high schools students in city of Esfahan, Iran during the academic calendar of 2011-2012. The study chooses a sample of 377 students based on clustering sampling technique and using Pearson correlation test as well as stepwise multiple regression technique, the relationship between school connection and academic failure is investigated. The result of Pearson correlation ratio indicates that there is meaningful relationship between these two components. In addition, the result of regression analysis indicates that 32% of students’ academic failure is determined by this ratio.

Total quality management (TQM) plays an important role on improving educational systems. In this paper, we present an empirical study to investigate the effect of TQM components on customer satisfaction in one of higher educational organizations in South East part of Iran called Qeshm. The proposed study investigates the effects of five TQM components including tangible, attitude, reliability, content and mode of delivery on customer satisfaction. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 37 questions and distributes it among a sample of university students and professors. Cronbach are calculated for significance, attitude, reliability, content and mode of delivery were 0.84, 0.83, 0.91, 0.90 and 0.83, respectively. The results of our survey are investigated using Pearson correlation ratios as well as regression analysis and the results indicate that all five components influence customer satisfaction, significantly.

Selecting a product development strategy that is associated with the company & apos; s current service or product innovation, based on customers’ needs and changing environment, plays an important role in increasing demand, increasing market share, increasing sales and profits. Therefore, it is important to extract effective variables associated with product development to improve performance measurement of firms. This paper investigates important factors influencing product development strategies using factor analysis. The proposed model of this paper investigates 36 factors and, using factor analysis, we extract six most influential factors including information sharing, intelligence information, exposure strategy, differentiation, research and development strategy and market survey. The first strategy, partnership, includes five sub-factor including product development partnership, partnership with foreign firms, customers’ perception from competitors’ products, Customer involvement in product development, inter-agency coordination, customer-oriented approach to innovation and transmission of product development change where inter-agency coordination has been considered the most important factor. Internal strengths are the most influential factors impacting the second strategy, intelligence information. The third factor, introducing strategy, introducing strategy, includes four sub criteria and consumer buying behavior is the most influencing factor. Differentiation is the next important factor with five components where knowledge and expertise in product innovation is the most important one. Research and development strategy with four sub-criteria where reducing product development cycle plays the most influential factor and finally, market survey strategy is the last important factor with three factors and finding new market plays the most important role.

E-banking plays an important role on increasing customer satisfaction and helps industry grow faster. Most banks try to retain their customers by introducing more electronic services to facilitate banking transactions. Creating loyalty through providing better banking services is a new area of research. In fact, e-loyalty can be directly impacted by e-satisfaction, e-trust, and indirectly influenced by e-services, perceived value, reputation, and habit. Therefore, the present paper deals with designing and explanation of loyalty formation model in e-banking. The preliminary results indicate that “satisfaction” is the most influential component affecting customer loyalty formation with an 87% diagnose coefficient. In addition, trust formation in customers may impact loyalty in an electronic environment with a 70% diagnose coefficient. Moreover, the most important factors impacting customer satisfaction include “reputation” “perceived value,” “service quality,” and “habit” with relative effects coefficients of 44%, 32%, 29%, and 26%, respectively. Finally, “reputation,” “service quality,” “habit” and “perceived value” have been the most important factors influencing customer trust with influence coefficients of 37%, 32%, 31%, and 24%, respectively.

Researchers have tried to investigate multiple factors affecting employees & apos; social, emotional, and psychological well-being. In this study particularly, nurses & apos; emotional and psychological well-being is considered. Of most important factors affecting well-being in place of work has known to be busy work and stress, constructive and destructive emotions, and psychological capital which. Present study considered to test a developed model of psychological capital, constructive and destructive emotions, stress, anxiety, and depression as antecedents of well-being. 296 nurses took part in the survey, using path analysis method hypotheses were tested, and the proposed model was evaluated. Results indicated that nurses & apos; high psychological capital increases their constructive emotions, reduces destructive emotions and eventually increase their well-being. The role of destructive emotions was more prominent in increasing wellbeing as well. Furthermore, stress had an incremental influence on well-being. In general, research results emphasize the need for more attention to the components of psychological capital, and intervention and coping strategies. The conclusions of a more detailed is that to improve nurses & apos; well-being the more emphasize should be on decreasing destructive emotions than increasing constructive ones. In addition, keeping an optimal level of stress is necessary for good functioning and improvement of overall well-being.