This paper presents an investigation on the role of brand image on customer loyalty on rubber industry. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 27 questions, distributes it among some Iranian experts in rubber industry and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number questions are reduced to 23. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.812 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.671 and 2375, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived six factors including penetration strategy, infrastructure characteristics, competitive pricing, target marketing strategy, communication strategy and market characteristics.

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.

This study examines the relationship between organizational climate and women employees & apos; creativity of Tabriz Red Crescent Organization. The research method is descriptive correlation performed among 120 women employed at the Red Crescent and 100 cases were selected for the proposed study. For data collection, Hoy and Miskel (2005) & apos; s organizational climate and Randsyp creativity questionnaires with 0.78 and 0.82 Cronbach & apos; s alpha coefficients were used. Pearson correlation and multiple regressions were used to analyze research hypotheses. Results showed that there was a significant relationship between two indices of manager and subordinate behaviors and creativity. In addition, in investigating the relationship between climate and creativity components, findings showed that there was a significant relationship only between cooperation and pretending to job dimensions and creativity. This study also has shown that managers & apos; behavior is closed and employees & apos; behavior is more open than managers are.

Personal characteristics of an entrepreneur are always considered as the most important parameters on creating jobs and opportunities, successfully. This paper presents an empirical study on personal characteristics of students who are supposed to act as entrepreneur to create jobs in two major fields of engineering and social sciences at Islamic Azad University located in city of Zanjan, Iran. There are eight aspects of accepting reasonable risk, locus of control, the need for success, mental health conditions, being pragmatic, tolerating ambiguity, dreaming and the sense of challenging in our study to measure the level of entrepreneurship. We uniformly distribute 366 questionnaires among undergraduate students in two groups and analyze the results based on t-student test. The results confirmed that the students who were enrolled in social sciences accept a reasonable amount of risk, maintain sufficient locus of control, wish to reach prosperity and success in their carrier and lives and maintain a good level of dreaming. On the other hand, the students who were enrolled in engineering field have sufficient level of mental health care, they are pragmatic and are able to handle ambiguity and they can handle possible challenges in their jobs, properly.

When aiming on improving efficiency and reducing cost in manufacturing environments, production scheduling can play an important role. Although a common workshop is full of uncertainties, when using mathematical programs researchers have mainly focused on deterministic problems. After briefly reviewing and discussing popular modeling approaches in the field of stochastic programming, this paper proposes a new approach based on utility theory for a certain range of problems and under some practical assumptions. Expected utility programming, as the proposed approach, will be compared with the other well-known methods and its meaningfulness and usefulness will be illustrated via a numerical examples and a real case.

For over two decades, telephone banking has steadily become a useful feature and all banks have tried to provide this feature as part of their services. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to study the role of personal and social characteristics on acceptance of new telephone banking services. The proposed study designs two questionnaires and distributes them among 384 randomly selected people who use telephone banking in city of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study examines various hypotheses and the results of our survey indicate that there were some positive and meaningful relationships between perception usefulness and users’ attitude, perception and ease of use, perception and intention to use as well as perception and intention to use. In addition, the study has detected a negative and meaningful relationship between personal risk and intention to use and perception of personal time and intention to use among mobile users.

During the past few years, digital libraries have been the primary source of retrieving necessary information. IT helps many scholars have the access to recently published value added researches around the world. However, information security and copyright concerns are among the most important issues and there must be good rules and regulation to protect authors against any sort of copyright violation. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to find out about the status of copyright issues in one of Iranian libraries. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 96 librarian experts. Cronbach alpha is equal to 0.76, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The results of our investigation indicate that although expert believe the status of copyright is in desirable level when the level of significance is five percent, there are some concerns on some issues. In other words, experts believed that all copyrights are not well protected and digital libraries do not follow governmental rules and regulation on fully protecting authors’ rights. In addition, experts believed that the security of sources available on digital libraries is not well protected.

The adoption of information technology (IT) along with supply chain management (SCM) has become increasingly a necessity among most businesses. This enhances supply chain (SC) performance and helps companies achieve the organizational competitiveness. IT systems capture and analyze information and enable management to make decisions by considering a global scope across the entire SC. This paper reviews the existing literature on IT in SCM and considers pertinent criteria. Using principal component analysis (PCA) of factor analysis (FA), a number of related criteria are divided into smaller groups. Finally, SC managers can develop an IT portfolio in SCM using mean values of few extracted components on the relevance –emergency matrix. A numerical example is provided to explain details of the proposed method.

Every year, the companies with favorable perspective are entered into stock exchange through Initial public offering (IPO). This issue is a treat for share of competitors in market and usually, IPO is offered while industry is in top of its valuation, which could be corrected after offering price. In this regard, we study the relationship between IPO and long-term performance of industry, identification and explaining the effective factors. In addition, the relationship of IPS has compared with portfolios of corresponding competitors. In this study, we conclude that the portfolios of competitors had an undesirable performance three years after initial offering. Six effective variables are verified on performance including industry concentration, industry valuation and homogeneity, size of offering, industry operating leverage and industry financial leverage. Undesirable effects of industry is specified when the industry valuation is rather high, industry is in top of valuation or concentration is high in industry, also, when the homogeneity of industry is more, undesirable effect is less.

Customers are the primary sources of making appropriate decisions and their feedbacks normally help us improve the quality of systems. In this paper, we present an empirical study to detect important factors influencing managers of banking industry make better decisions. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 32 questions, distributes it among some bank managers. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.805. In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.701 and 1675, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived nine factors including customers’ welfare strategy, systems integration, organizational culture assessment, corporate strategies, organizational development, intelligence data strategies, supporting strategies, resource planning as well as research and development.