IRANIAN JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCES
Year:2008 | Volume:2 | Issue:8|Papers Count:12

Although human resources could be regarded as the best competitive advantage of some organizations today and human beings are now more important than ever, they could sometimes be the main obstacle against organizations. This paper tends to study anti-citizenship behavior (ACB) and examine stress as a contextual factor, injustice and culture as organizational factors and personality as an individual factor affecting ACB. The more ACBs the employees show, the more organization's performance is affected and its image is deteriorated. A total of 243 employees of a private institution filled out a questionnaire in order to test the proposed research model. Results show that among the above mentioned factors injustice has the most effect on ACB.

In recent decades, the subjects of transformation, innovation, and entrepreneurship have attracted considerable attention in managing public sector organizations. While the term "entrepreneurship" originally has been applied in private sector debates, it can be seen in public administration literature as well. We study the condition of entrepreneurship in several Iranian public organizations using McKenzie and Daft internal and external factors as a conceptual framework. Findings show that these organizations do not have a desirable entrepreneurial posture and for developing this posture, internal and external organizational factors should provide the necessary conditions and support entrepreneurial behavior and activities in public organizations. Based on the findings, a framework is provided to help public sector organizations in developing and establishing organizational entrepreneurship.  

The purpose of this research is to explain the relationship between export market expansion strategies and export performance and to detect factors affecting this relationship. We study factors influencing export market expansion strategy and impacts of this strategy on export performance simultaneously using the profile deviation approach to test the concept of co-alignment. Results (obtained by studying food manufacturer exporters in Iran during 2003-2005) show that market concentrators and market spreaders do not differ in most export performance dimensions (including export level and relative export growth). These findings are in accordance with the contingency approach, stating that the success of an export market expansion strategy depends on many different situational factors as well as the alignment between these factors and strategy. Findings show factors as gaining more market share as an export objective, product adaptation to customer needs in target markets, solving logistic problems, management international outlook, production capabilities, competitive pricing and regular visits to target markets to be the determinants that fit the market concentration strategy. On the other hand, more sales volume, coping with pricing constraints, production capabilities and marketing capabilities are the factors that fit the market spreading strategy.

This paper studies the relationship between HR and business strategies of a large Iranian tissue manufacturer with regard to the effect of organizational culture on formulating these strategies. In strategic human resource management it is necessary to have a holistic view towards business strategy, organizational culture and HR strategies due to their interrelatedness. Secondary data was used to identify the business strategy and 145 questionnaires filled out by organizational employees were used to identify organizational culture. Although formulating HR strategies which are aligned with business strategies and organizational culture is regarded as an example for applying natural models for formulating HR strategy, this paper has not only used a natural model but also has proposed three different scenarios.

Due to the key role of human resources and its management in helping organizations achieve their objectives, applying strategic human resource management for supporting upper level strategies (in the form of vertical communication) and also using them as a mechanism for integrating HRM tasks (in the form of horizontal communication) is commonplace nowadays.Having 22 top and middle-level managers fill out the research questionnaire we study HRM department of Iran's Ministry of ICT to determine its strengths and weaknesses (both organizational and individual) and its opportunities and threats as well. Results show that as far as organizational internal factors "organizational culture" is the main organizational strength, "organizational goals, programs and procedures" are the main organizational weaknesses, "attitudes and values" are the main individual strengths and "responsibility and effort" are the main individual weaknesses of the organization. As far as the external environment, "social factors" is the main opportunity and "political and economical factors" are the main threats for the organization. These results provide useful information for managers tending to develop effective strategies for the organization.

It is believed that most of the marketing research activities concentrate on consumer's reflection to marketing strategies. This is the reason why attitude towards future of marketing should shift from making revenues to adding values for company's shareholders. A sample survey on 356 traders was conducted at TSE and data were analyzed using explorative factor analysis. Research findings indicate five main factors that influence Iranian investors' purchase decisions. Findings show that marketing communication channel, brokerage houses and word of mouth (consequence of all company's activity) are important influential factors on investor's purchase decision.