IRANIAN JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCES
Year:2012 | Volume:6 | Issue:21|Papers Count:14

In today’s ever-changing world of business, organizations are required to align with environmental changes and it is also extremely necessary for organizations to forecast the impacts of managers’ decisions on business model change. In response to these requirements, this study addresses designing dynamic business models. Simulating management decision scenarios is an effective way to investigate the impact of decisions on business model components, relationships among the components, and business results and benefits of resolution. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to take advantage of system dynamics approach as an operational, quantitative, and flexible approach for business model simulation. In this study, related literature has been thoroughly reviewed, proportionate to the level and approach of the current study, Business Model Ontology (BMO) was selected to serve as the model of this study. The model was then designed using system dynamics approach and its structure was evaluated using expert judgments. In the next step, some scenarios were developed and executed to confirm the behavior of the model and also to evaluate the importance of applying system dynamics approach in business model simulation especially in the process of business model design and change. Although system dynamics approach precedents in business studies, this research contributes to operationalization of this approach in BM design and analysis.

Criticizing and revising constructs, especially prevalent constructs, is necessary for the development of the organizational field of research. One of the constructs which is frequently used in organizational research is teamwork quality. Hoegl and Gemuenden defined teamwork quality as a comprehensive construct which embraces all team interaction concepts. However, this construct has some important shortcomings which are theoretically and empirically discussed in this paper. Here, it is shown that this construct could not be used as an underlying concept of team interactions. Moreover, its conceptualization and operationalization encounter serious difficulties. This paper proposes that it is needed to unify “effort” and “balance of contributions” to alleviate these shortcomings. Besides, it is needed to add “conflict”, “goal setting”, and “decision making” concepts to team interaction framework. Accordingly, new combination of items, in a questionnaire instrument is suggested. Using a sample of 152 Iranian students and structural equation modeling it is shown that the new model for team interaction fits better to the data than the previous teamwork quality model. Finally, the research implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to foresight accountability of Iranian NGO in Health and Hygiene field. Data of this study was collected via cross-impact questionnaire, Uncertainty questionnaire, Semi- structural interviews, expert panels & explanatory studies. The first step is to review literatures and determine the key factors and cross impacts of them in the primary questionary. After cross impact analysis of primary questionary by structural analysis, we indicated the uncertainties of Iranian NGOs. This method is completely expert based and finally we write scenarios by the expert panels and interviews.The study’s finding shows that NGO’s empowerment and public participation in NGO’s activity are the main uncertainties which our Iranian NGS’s will involve in future. Governmental approaches, NGO’s role in empowerment & public awareness will affect the accountability of Iranian NGO.

Current management and organization literature has focused on employee empowerment and use of open communication channels. Despite this fact, results of empirical research have shown that employees believe that open communication, information, explicit or implicit knowledge sharing are not supported within their organizations. Lack of information and trust and presence of organizational silence is one of the most important obstacles to organization success. Organizational silence refers to situations where employees withhold information, ideas and suggestions about potential problems. In response to the need for further research regarding organizational silence, this paper addresses the concept of organizational silence and voice, types of employee silence and voice, and the philosophical dimensions of silence. In addition, negative consequences of this behavioral problem are discussed in this paper.

This article reports the findings of the content analysis of 184 public administration theses defended at university of Tehran within a 10-year period (1998-2007). The content of the master’s theses were analyzed regarding their subject areas and research methods.  Results revealed that some trends in subject’s areas and research methods in public administration theses could be identified. The master's theses focused mainly on three fields: human resources (79 of 252), organizational behavior (78 of 252), and organization theory & design (72 of 252). Therefore, it could be concluded that subject areas did not include topics which are considered to be more related to public administration issues (e.g. policy making). Regarding data analysis techniques, most of the theses used correlation coefficient (132 of 323), analyze of variance (72 of 323), or mean difference tests (69 of 323). Questionnaire was the most frequently employed tool for collecting data (174 of 257), compared to interviews (43 of 257), archival analysis (36 of 257), and observations (4 of 257).

Today, environmental issues such as ozone depletion, air and water pollution, global warming, jungles demolition, acid rains, etc. are among the most serious threats to human beings lives. In the field of business and management, the role of organizations in society has changed and they have become more responsible to minimize their effects on the environment. Green supply chain management integrates supply chain management with environmental management system in all stages. This paper aims to describe some aspects of green supply chain management including sustainable and green supply chain management and GSCM drivers, practices and performance within Iranian automobile industry. We conducted a survey to collect data from automobile enterprises in Iran. Data from the GSCM practices in Iranian automobile industry are ranked using fuzzy TOPSIS decision making method.

In theory, it is often expected that the financial performance and productivity of state owned firms are improved after privatization. But some empirical researches conducted in western countries have found findings which do not confirm this expectation. In addition, there is no solid research evidence available regarding the performance of Iranian firms being privatized in recent decade. Thus, there exist considerable doubts about the real effects of privatization on the performance of such firms. This research was carried out to investigate the effects of privatizing state owned Iranian firms on their financial/operational performance. Therefore, six years of financial/operational performance of 42 firms was examined against some generally accepted criteria. All of the sample firms were privatized during 1990-2008 by transferring at least 50% of their shares to the private sector. Performances of these firms three years before and three years after privatization were studied. Results revealed that the transfer of shares (change in ownership of the firms) has caused only small amount of improvement in the firms' profitability and human resource productivity, whereas privatization has had no significant effects on the firms total factor productivity (TFP), total assets turn over, and capital productivity.