Performance management plays an essential role on increasing efficiency of business units. It helps find important barriers against a business unit helping us setup better strategies for handling troubles. In this paper, we present an empirical study to find important factors influencing performance management in cooperative organizations. The proposed study uses analytical hierarchy process to rank important factors in three groups of team level, individual and organization levels. The survey is based on receiving feedbacks from decision makers and making a pairwise comparison on measuring the relative importance of each criterion influencing performance management. The results of our survey indicate that setting appropriate standards for performance management is the most important item followed by relationship between organization structure and performance management, performance management based on future events. The other three factors including continuous improvement and updating systems, encouraging employee for change culture and relationship between future outlook and performance management are other important factors.

Organizational commitment plays an important role on the success of business units. Many companies rely on their human resources and when some skilled employees leave an organization, there would be a chaos in some organizations especially in small business units. The proposed study of this paper gathers the necessary information from 200 employees who work for custom organization in Iran. The results of factor analysis have indicated there are four factors influencing organizational commitments. The first factor is associated with cultural factor, the second issue is related to human resource based factors while the third factor indicates the behavior based factors and finally empowering based factors are the last item. The ratio of Chi-Square/df is equal to 2.66, which is less than 3 and this validates the results. We have also used structural equation modeling and the results show that the third factor, behavior based components, is the most important factor followed by the second factor, human resource factor. In addition, the third important factor is cultural issues followed by empowering factors.

This paper investigates political behavior in organization context. In the first section, it studies inappropriate terminology in political behavior arena and recommends that political behaviors are neither positive nor negative in nature. The study also demonstrates that ends and means for influencing others are two criteria for determining faces of political behavior. In the second section, related and important research are reviewed and categorized in terms of content. Finally, we present the dominant paradigm of political behavior as a philosophical infrastructure. The study also presents some guidelines for further research the limitations are discussed in conclusion part.

Warranty is recognized as an important component of product marketing and it can increase customers & apos; confidence. All services during warranty are considered as an additional cost for producers where these expenses are associated with product reliability and warranty components. Product reliability is also influenced by decisions taken in the field of product design and process and arrangement in this period. Product reliability also plays an important role in new products for production planning. As competition increases all around the world, there is an increasing interest in providing suitable substrates for the acceleration of economic growth and development and production. Warranty is one of the basic infrastructures and behaviors in today & apos; s competitive world, which is boosting sales and typically profits and customer & apos; s satisfaction and confidence play important roles in achieving this goal. In this study, we first evaluate warranty policies and strategies and then we consider after selling services taken in a case study. Finally, some strategies are introduced to improve the current situation and to achieve suitable model for ideal situation.

Organizational intelligence plays an important role developing business units and organizations. Understating the barriers surrounding an organization helps us take possible actions to remove any issues. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to find barriers in university located in Province of Semnan, Iran. The proposed study of this paper first detects important barriers and then prioritize them using analytical hierarchy process. Based on the results of this paper, structural barriers are considered as the most important issue follows by legal barriers, cultural and executive barriers. The results of our survey indicate that lack of organizational knowledge management relation with daily activities, project complexity, lack of the knowledge exchanging and sharing in the organization, lack of suitable business context and absence of a documented program for the organizational intelligence dismounting are among the most important barriers according to our AHP implementation results.


DOI: 10.5267/j.msl.2012.09.006
Keywords: , Organizational intelligence dismounting barriers,

In this paper, we present an empirical study to find the relationship between discretionary accruals quality as well as innate accruals quality and portion of non-executive board of directors, concentration of ownership ratio and board size in Tehran Stock Exchange. The survey selects 118 qualified stocks from this exchange and using a random technique chooses 42 firms. The study implements two linear regression techniques to estimate the first part of the information and then using structural equation modeling examines six hypotheses. Based on the results of this survey we can conclude that an increase on non-executive members positively influences on discretionary accruals quality and negatively influences innate accruals quality. Concentration of ownership ratio positively influences on discretionary accruals quality and negatively impacts on innate accruals quality. Finally, size of board of directors negatively impacts discretionary accruals quality and positively influences on innate accruals quality.

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) consists of some nodes, which are randomly placed in operational environment. This type of network does not have any infrastructure and nodes are completely dynamic and moveable. Each node can contact with the other in-range nodes. One of the disadvantages of MANET is the low lifetime of nodes power in which the energy consumption of the network goes up due to connectivity overheads. In this paper, by presenting a Fuzzy clustering algorithm, we endeavor for a more optimized energy consumption of this network by reducing the number of re-election of clusterheads (CHs) and reducing the re-affiliation of nodes and also by selecting the best node as CH amongst current members of each cluster. The result of simulation shows that our algorithm performs better than other existing algorithm.

Cultural variety is a behavioral characteristic of investors and evaluating the cultural influences in the area of financial management on the decisions of investors plays an important role. In fact, different behaviors and decisions are required in various cultures facing the prices, price fluctuations and important or non-important published news of portfolio. In this paper, a questionnaire was designed including 22 cultural items in three criteria of values, facilities and behavior in order to measure the cultural factors affecting investment in stock exchange. Experts’ comments were used on the design of items and quintet Likert spectrum was applied for the answers. Structural equation modeling, or multivariable analysis with latent variables, is a comprehensive statistical approach for testing the hypotheses about relationships between observed and latent variables. Such analyzes have been done by LISREL software and the results showed that there was a significant relationship between investment and its triple factors and also between the items and triple factors affecting on investment.

Development of industries needs expansion of public transportation and, consequently, heavy transportation increases hazardous and dangerous transportation too. Therefore, we need to consider some strategies to reduce bad effects of transportation of hazardous materials such as road accidents. Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Treats (SWOT) analysis is an applicable method for designing strategies in this area. However, SWOT analysis does not provide specific strategies and it does not consider the efficiency and performance of each strategy. Applying a hybrid method of analyzing the strategies and their performance evaluation help decision makers select the best strategies based on the current limitations. In this paper, different strategies for hazardous transportation risk reduction are designed and relative efficiencies of all alternatives are compared using DEA method. The proposed model of this paper uses three inputs including implementation costs, operation and maintenance cost and operational and four outputs including accident rate reduction, fuel consumption reduction, employment rate increment and deaths number reduction. The results of the implementation using seven different strategies have yielded two important strategies including continuous improvement of vehicle standards, driving skills, transportation system quality, and loading methods and expansion of petroleum pipe network.

Fashion plays an important role on lifestyle and many people spend their money proportion to fashion changes. In this paper, we present an empirical study among students who attend some private schools in Iran. The study investigates whether there is any correlation between fashion consciousness as well as fashion practices and national identity, university student gender and mass media. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes among 384 students who attend university and analyze the results using Pearson correlation test. The results indicate that there is a positive correlation between national consciousness and fashion, a positive correlation between using mass media applications and fashion. However, the results of the study do not indicate any significance correlation between fashion and mixture of students in terms of gender.