Brands are considered as valuable assets of a company both economically and strategically. Thus, having customers who are loyal to a brand is one of the main goals of businesses companies. Identifying and anticipating the customers’ needs are vital to the enterprises gaining competitive advantage and market segmentation. Maintaining and enforcing customers’ loyalty is a strategic challenge for companies seeking to keep and promote their competitive status in the market. High brand loyalty of the customers generates competitive advantage for the company and it increases the income and decreases the costs of marketing. In addition to increasing the market share, loyalty allows to ask for higher prices compared with its competitors. This study seeks to investigate the factors influencing customer loyalty to sport brands. The statistical population of this research was Tehran city. Using simple cluster sampling, 502 customers of four known brand sports, i.e. Nike, Puma, Adidas, Reebok, and Fila were chosen. Furthermore, a questionnaire, which assessed seven variables including reputations, brand name, brand image, brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, promotion and the price was used and the hypotheses were analyzed using statistical tests such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test), Spearman correlation, simultaneous linear regression and binomial test. The findings suggested that the brand name has a strong correlation with brand loyalty. Moreover, variables such as reputation, brand image, customer satisfaction, price and promotions also have positive and significant effect on the brand loyalty.

Collaboration can be a very challenging process precisely because it is a highly intense way of working, requiring new ways of thinking, behavior and ways of operating. Cultural Intelligence (CI) is an antecedent for collaboration . The primary goal of this survey is to investigate the relationship between cultural intelligence of managers and their employees’ collaboration. This research is a descriptive-correlation study where 119 managers and 175 employees are selected by stratified random sampling from the Social Security organization managers and their workers. To measure cultural intelligence, the Iranian version of the cultural intelligence questionnaire is implemented and collaboration is measured using a questionnaire developed by the researcher. The Cronbach & apos; s alpha reliability coefficient respectively for cultural intelligence and collaboration questionnaires are 0.933 and 0.813, respectively, which are well above the minimum acceptable limit. Data collected using SPSS 19 and they are analyzed using LISREL 8.54 software packages. The results indicate a significant and positive relationship between cultural intelligence among managers and their employees’ collaboration. As the relationship between motivational and behavioral CI dimensions and collaboration is also determined to be positive and significant. Based on demographic factors such as gender, age and education we cannot comment on the cultural intelligence of managers and employee’s collaboration but having inter-cultural experiences has had a positive impact on the cultural intelligence of managers. Based on the findings obtained we can say that Cultural Intelligence is a key factor, influencing and determining for collaboration.

Psychologists and researchers of management sciences are of great interest in subject of stress and the major reason for this is its impact on psychological well-being and organizational consequences. They also recommend that preventing stress called destructive stress results from factors such as role ambiguity, role uncertainty, and organizational policies, and decreases both the individual and organizational performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of role conflict and role ambiguity on employees' job stress by explaining the role of work-family conflict. The statistical population of this study is comprised of 530 employees of Iran's central insurance. Using stratified random sampling and Cochran's formula, a sample of 118 employees was selected. We used a researcher-made questionnaire for data gathering. The Cronbach's alpha for this questionnaire was .88 and split-half reliability was .80, which represents for a reliable questionnaire. Furthermore, we used content validity and confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the validity of questionnaire. Data analysis was accomplished by structural equation modeling using the LISREL software v 8.7. Research results indicate that the effect of role ambiguity on work-family conflict is statistically significant (p-value = 62.40). Furthermore, the effect of role ambiguity on job stress was confirmed with significance of 1.83. On the other hand, the effect of role conflict on work-family conflict was not confirmed, because its significance value was negative. However, it was found that the job stress is influenced by role conflict (p-value = 2.35). And finally, the effect of work-family conflict on job stress was confirmed with the number of .93 for its significance value.

We present a social work study on relationship between parenting styles and career aspirations as well as psychological well-being among third year high school female students in city of Khomeinishahr, Iran during the year of 2012. The study selects a sample of 300 students from 1260 female students who were enrolled in third year high school education, randomly. The study uses the Baumrind’s questionnaire on parenting style, which consists of 30 questions which equally measure three parenting styles including authoritarian, indulgent and authoritative in Likert scale. The survey also uses Gottfredson’s questionnaire to examine occupational aspirations. The study examines whether there is any relationship between parenting style from one side and three personal characteristics including gender, career aspiration and wishes type on the other side. Using Chi-Square technique, the survey examines three hypotheses and the results confirm all three hypotheses of the survey.

One of the primary concerns on performance measurement is to know how much a particular project cost. However, using traditional method on project-based products often leads to inappropriate results. In this paper, we re-examine this issue by comparing the cost of a power station construction project using ABC versus traditional method. The results of survey show that ABC method is capable of providing better estimates for overhead costs compared with traditional method. In other words, ABC method helps reduce some of the unnecessary overhead cost items and increase on some other cost components. This helps increase the relative efficiency of the system by reducing total cost of project.

During the past two decades, there has been a growing trend on knowledge-based organizations. Innovation, on the other hand, plays essential role on building competitive business units. In this paper, we present an exploratory study to identify critical factors of innovation culture in organizations. We detect important factors influencing innovation culture in construction industry based on the implementation of factor analysis. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 400 experts who are involved in construction industry. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.779, which validates the overall questionnaire. The results of factor analysis have indicated that six factors of building cultural infrastructures, education, organizational vision, established culture, strategic culture and flexible culture are the most important items influencing innovation culture.

During the past few years, many organizations try to provide some of their services through their websites. This would help them provide fast and reliable services to various people around the world. In this paper, we present an empirical survey to measure the relative performance of a university website in Iran using Parasuraman & apos; s technological readiness index. The proposed study uses a standard questionnaire and distributes it among 387 active website users and the results are analyzed using structural equation modeling. The proposed study of this paper considers the effects of four factors including efficiency, accessibility, achievement and security on customer loyalty via two variables of trust and satisfaction. The results demonstrate that three components of trust, efficiency and achievement play essential role on customer loyalty.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to find out important factors influencing future research, training and employment in Iranian scientific environment. The proposed model of this paper prepares a questionnaire consists of various questions and distributes it among some experts and analyze them using DEMATEL model. The model divides the 7 factors into two groups of cause and effect. On the cause side, there are four factors including preventing future unemployment crises, detecting future skills, finding future profitable/unprofitable job opportunities and prevention on having open position with no volunteer to work. On the effect factors, there are three factors influencing the future research including detecting the present risk associated with jobs, detecting necessary standards for future works and creating a balance between demand and supply.

Increasing intensity of competition among organizations in current century has caused everlasting search for ways to gain competitive advantage and win the competition. In this regard, organizational learning certainly counts as a competitive advantage to gain for today’s managers. This study aims to discuss the mediating role of organizational learning in the relationship between market orientation and organizational performance. The study population includes all of the employees in the Central Office of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. As 170 samples were randomly stratified and selected, information obtained was analyzed using SPSS software ver.20. While results support the significance of organizational learning’s mediating role in the relationship between intelligence generation and intelligence dissemination with organizational performance, this role was declared insignificant in the relationship between responsiveness and organizational performance.

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.