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:

Managing empty containers in shipping industry plays an important role to increase the profitability on marine shipping industry. This paper presents an empirical investigation to detect influential factors in container transportation and estimates the value of empty containers transportation. The study also evaluates and compares different strategies employed to reduce the charge of empty container transportation. By selecting three major passages including Trans-pacific, trans-Atlantic and Europe-Asia and considering the balance in transportation network, regardless of the origin of shipping companies, an optimistic estimation of empty container transportation would be possible; therefore, empty container transportation could be explained, quantitatively. Furthermore, since shipping companies organize the movement of containers in various routes, four different strategies are also proposed.

Operational auditing is one of the management consultancy services whose significance is on the rise day by day. This approach is, clearly, a systematic and methodical process used to evaluate economic savings of financial processes in organizations and the results of the evaluations are reported to interested people along with some comments to improve operational processes. Accordingly, it appears that the proper employment of the existing rationale in operational auditing can be a significant step towards the improvement of financial efficiency in Iranian public and private banking sector. This paper studies the effects of operational auditing on the improvement of economic saving of financial processes in Iranian private banks compared with traditional approaches where the operations are based on financial statements. The population of this survey includes 15 private and public Iranian banks and the proposed study selects 78 branches, randomly. The Cronbach alpha was used to test the reliability a questionnaire employed to collect the needed data in this study. The results obtained by SPSS Software indicated that the reliability of the instruments\ranged between 0.752 and 0.867, suggesting an acceptable level of the reliability for the questionnaire. Besides, content validity was used to confirm the validity of the instrument. The results of the study indicated that the operational auditing as a useful approach influencing the financial efficiency of public and private banks has significantly transformed the traditional thinking in the field of management auditing. The operational auditing has a number of significant advantages including a better method of controlling financial operations within Iranian banks, efficient planning in the future, facilitating efficient, appropriate, and accurate management decision making, and sound evaluation of managers’ financial operations.

This paper presents a social work study to measure the impact of various cultural factors on consumerism in city of Esfahan, Iran. The proposed study uses clustering technique to choose a sample of 300 families out of 70,000 residences of this city. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among participants. Cronbach alpha have been calculated as 0.85 and 0.92 for cultural factors and consumerism, respectively. The results of Pearson correlation ratios indicate that there are statistically meaningful relationships between consumerism and four components of culture including religious believes, tendency to luxuries, using different multi medias and adherence to traditions.

Having reliable and skilled employees are essential component of any organization. Employees are considered as intangible assets for most organizations and they are the primary source of making value added decisions. On the other hand, a learning organization is capable of making continuous improvement and survives in today’s competitive environment. The proposed study of this paper considers whether training programs could empower employees who were working as managers for Saipa Group Company, a well-known automaker in Iran. The study concentrates on those employees who participated in master program in one of educational organizations in city of Tehran, Iran. 178 managers attended this program representing approximately 70% of total managers. The results of our survey have indicated that while training programs have created meaningful sense and help them have a better sense of efficacy it has not created any feeling of competence or building feeling of self-organization. The survey also concluded that training programs could increase the level of meaningful sense and the feeling of competence. In addition, the results indicate that training programs could increase employees’ self-organization as well as efficacy characteristics.

This paper presents an integrated supplier selection and inventory management using grey relationship model (GRM) as well as multi-objective decision making process. The proposed model of this paper first ranks different suppliers based on GRM technique and then determines the optimum level of inventory by considering different objectives. To show the implementation of the proposed model, we use some benchmark data presented by Talluri and Baker [Talluri, S., & Baker, R. C. (2002). A multi-phase mathematical programming approach for effective supply chain design. European Journal of Operational Research, 141(3), 544-558.]. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed model of this paper is capable of handling different criteria for supplier selection.

Paradigms are some principles and assumptions, which define frameworks and research priorities in each discipline. Many believe that operational research (OR) is not a science and like many other sciences does not have any paradigm. However, since OR is committed to scientific methods, therefore it contains a methodological paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to consider theoretical methodologies in the field of OR. This paper performs a review on the existing literature based on interpretive hermeneutic approach. Based on literature review, the study determines four principles and assumptions for each OR paradigms and a classification of the methods are presented. The results show that OR has four main paradigms and there are many methods in OR fields to tackle a particular problem where each problem belongs to a particular paradigm. In addition, instead of using a particular method in problem situations, we can implement a combination of methodologies.

The proposed study of this paper present an empirical investigation to detect important factors impacting on food market using factor analysis. The proposed study designed a questionnaire, distributed among 207 customers who were regular customers of two food chains in city of Tehran, Iran named Shahrvand and Hyperstar. The results of our survey indicate that six major factors including brand loyalty, physical characteristics, pricing effects, performance characteristics, brand relationship and brand position influence food industry, significantly. In terms of the first factor, brand loyalty, “Trust”, “Packaging design characteristics”, “Competitive pricing strategy”, “Stability in quality”, “External relationships” and “Meeting expectations” are important factors in different categories.