JOURNAL OF URBAN ECONOMICS AND MANAGEMENT
Year:2017 | Volume:5 | Issue:3 (19) |Papers Count:8

Applying organizational excellence models has been effective on assessment of organization’s performance in order to identify strengths, weaknesses, and organizations’ achievement to better quality and performance. Organizational excellence is subject to certain conditions, culture, internal and external environment, characteristics of organization’s human force, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that covered the organization. In this regard, identification the path of organizational excellence leads to organization’s development and success. This research aims to assess organizational excellence of Bank Shahr based on EFQM Excellence Model by using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This research is descriptive, field survey, and cross- sectional addressing to assess organizational excellence of Bank Shahr from perspective of Tehran branches’ managers in 2014. Statistical population includes 193 branch managers of Bank Shahr in 2014.100 of them were selected as sample by using Cochran formula with simple random sampling. Data were collected through researcher- made questionnaire according to the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and taken from the competence criteria of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) model. The validity was confirmed by professors and experts’ opinion and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha. To analyze data collection, AHP was used. According to the model’s criteria weight, the results indicated that the highest rank is related to strategy and policy-making, and the lowest one is related to business results at Bank Shahr.

Organizational change is one of the most important issues in organizational behavior management that many studies have been done regarding the role of this factor in improving organizational efficiency and achieving to organizational goals. One of the factors that have an influential role in organizational efficiency and success is psychological empowerment of employees. Today, in new management, strategic and structural plans of leading organizations are formulated consistent with the development and enhancement of its manpower. In this regard, attention to the role of organizational culture is of great importance to achieve this objective. For this purpose and given the diversity of organizational culture models, in this research, different organizational culture patterns have been investigated, and then, the role of organizational culture in improving psychological empowerment of employees to attain competitive advantage at Bank Shahr was studied. The results indicated that organizational culture has positive, direct and significant impact on improving psychological empowerment of Bank Shahr employees. In this regard, improvement of organizational culture or its failure leads to an increase or decrease in the psychological empowerment of employees. Accordingly, this has a direct impact on their economic efficiency. Furthermore, the study of the model in terms of goodness of fit showed that the theoretical model is statistically significant and the theoretical concept is practical, and in terms of the desirability of fitness, according to the statistics calculated by statistical software, it is estimated in an acceptable situation.

Determination and the estimation of the house price in urban areas has a great importance for governments, individual and state investors and common people.The mentioned estimation can be used in future planning and decision making of many urban and regional policies. In this regard, due to the vital importance of the house price in recent decades powerful and effective functions have been used in order to forecast and estimate the house price. The main purpose of the current study was to present an optimal model to forecast and identify the determinants of the house price in Ahvaz metropolitan by the comparison of the Hedonic and Artificial Neural Network Models and the choice of the optimal model. The present study has a developmental-applied nature which follows a descriptive-analytical approach. The sample included 286 statistical unit in 2015 based on 27 related variables were evaluated to forecast the house price in Ahvaz city. This study used semi-log hedonic function and Neural Network Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) approaches. To compare the results of the two models in terms of predictability the criteria of R2, MSE, RMSE, MAPE, MAE and TIC coefficient were utilized. The results of the Hedonic model indicated that that among 27 variables, 18 variables were significant model and by the comparison of the results and the estimated value, it turned out that housing prices in Ahvaz is mainly influenced by the physical and structural factors. Moreover, the comparison between all criteria demonstrated that the Artificial Neural Network had a better performance than the Hedonic regression model in forecasting the house price. In order to test the difference of precision in forecasts of the house price in Ahvaz the Morgan- Granger- New bold test was conducted as an appropriate instrument. The results of test indicated that the there was a significant difference between the predicative power of the two models which confirmed the greater performance of the ANN (%98) model in comparison with Hedonic regression model (88%).

Today, competitiveness has become one of the most applied concepts in regional and urban studies. The reason, why much attention has been devoted to this concept is the changes in the world economy, demographical changes of countries, changes in social structures and activities. This research aimed to conduct a spatial analysis of competitiveness of Iran provinces based on educational factors. In terms of scope, this research is an applied study and in terms of nature and research method is descriptive analytic one.75 factor from education section of national population and housing consensus of 1390 (2011) have selected and analyzed. For analyzing Coefficient of Variant (C.V), VIKOR and geographically weighted regression in the Arc GIS were used. The research findings indicate inappropriate distribution in the educational factors between provinces of Iran. Totally, 46% of educational factors distributed in unsuitable way, and Sistan and Baluchestan, Kurdistan and Ilam provinces are in most inequality but in turn, West Azerbaijan, Isfahan and East Azerbaijan are in the good situation. Final results shows that, in terms of educational competitiveness, Tehran province is in the first level, Razavi Khorasan, Khuzestan, Fars, Isfahan, East Azerbaijan, Kerman, Mazanderan provinces are placed in the second level, and in the third level Gilan, Sistan and Baluchestan, West Azerbaijan, Lorestan, Hormozgan, Golestan, Kermanshah, Hamadan, Markazi, Kurdistan, Alborz, Qazvin, Ardebil, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer- Ahmad, Boushehr, Yazd, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Zanjan, Semnan, South Khorasan, Qom, Ilam and North Khorasan provinces are located. Overall conclusions indicate that development situations of Iran provinces in terms of educational factors are not in good consistent with concepts of social and spatial justice and required bottom-up approach and decentralized planning. Moreover, economic growth depends on establishment of performance-oriented education system.

This paper has been done in order to recognize and review the existing job market, to analyze obvious and hidden aspects of unemployment, and to develop employment field in Tehran province. First, by using statistical information and determining economic parts ratio of job market and workforce’s divisional transition, the quantity and additive parts of work force for all towns of Tehran province were specified and then the real amount of work force demand was estimated in Iran horizon prospects up to 2025. In this paper, some models were used, based on output-input job market way. They include: the first method was based on employees statistics in economic portion. It consists of shift- share with location-quotient method. The second method input-output is based on production value added, that was used in three main parts such as economy, agriculture, service and industry to evaluate attraction or export of work forces in every town. The research findings show that employment share in agricultural part from 2006 to 2015 encountered 0.1% reduction and from 2016 to 2025 it would face 0.1% amplification. Employment share in industry part increased up to 0.3% and then to 1404 it would encounter 5% reduction. Service sector share in 2006 to 2015 was nearly stable (it decreased to 0.2%). And then from 2015 up to 2025 it continues its increase procedure and reached to 5% growth. Most employment variation is related to the share of service sector. Most location-quotient using employment model is related to Tehran city in service sector and least amount related to Tehran city is in agricultural and industrial part.

Citizenship education is one of the main pillars of social life in the current era. Skills of citizenship education are addressed through various planning in advanced societies. Given such conditions, this research aims to investigate effective factors on citizenship education from perspective of municipal employees in the city of Zanjan. In terms of purpose, this research is applied, and in terms of data collection, it is descriptive-survey. Statistical population includes all municipality employees of Zanjan city and 240 of them were selected as sample by using multi- stage cluster sampling. Research tool was researcher- made questionnaire based on five-point Likert scale. Its face validity was confirmed by academic experts and its reliability was calculated using by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient equal to 0.93. However, in order to analyze data, one-sample T-test and Friedman ranking test were used. The most important findings indicated that all effective factors on citizenship education including behaviors based on socio- political actions, law- abiding and law- orientation, behaviors based on religious and national commands, and those based on protecting environment and sustainable development are at significance level of 0.05. The results of Freidman test indicated that municipal employees in the city of Zanjan prioritized behaviors based on religious and national commands, law-abiding and law-orientation, those based on socio-political actions, and those based on protecting environment and sustainable development as effective factors on citizenship education respectively at the level of 0.05.

Today, human resources management is one of the most important duties of organizational managers. They confront with issues such as job motivation, organizational learning and psychological empowerment. This study was conducted to investigate the impact of job motivation on organizational learning and psychological empowerment of municipal employees of Yasooj. In terms of purpose, research method is applied and it is descriptive- correlative in terms of data collection. The statistical population included all of Yasuj municipal employees among them 146 people were selected as a sample by using Cochran formula and simple random sampling method. The research tools consisted of three questionnaires: Herzberg Professional Motivation (1984), Neife’s Organizational Learning (2001) and Spreader’s Psychological Empowerment (1995). Their validity and reliability were confirmed. Regression test was used for data analysis. The most important findings show that job motivation illustrates 0.039 of organizational learning variance and 0.122 of the variance of psychological empowerment of employees, which indicates that job motivation has the ability to predict changes in organizational learning and psychological empowerment. Therefore, job motivation has significant impact on organizational learning and psychological empowerment of municipal employees.

Today, the city and every environment of civil and social life become meaningful to the citizens. The relationship between citizenship and urban management is one of the important issues that have been considered in the field of urban management in the world. One of the factors that can lead to the realization and sustainability of the democratic system in society through public gatherings is the attention to citizens' rights that can be achieved by the councils to achieve this goal. In a comprehensive glance, the councils have the keyword of civil rights in itself since the philosophy of the council itself is a part of the realization of the criteria and components of the citizenship rights. In other words, the councils are the realization of citizenship rights. In this regard, the present study examines the performance of Tehran City Council in the realization of citizenship rights. This research is applied and survey-descriptive in terms of method. Data collection was carried out in two ways: library- documentary and survey-field with questionnaires. The available sample is 150 employees of the Islamic Council and 384 citizens of Tehran in 2016. To analyze the collected data, SPSS software, T-test, Pearson correlation coefficient and regression were used. The results of this study showed that citizens of Tehran have less than average performance of city council due to lack of proper mechanism for monitoring city affairs and realization of citizenship rights. In addition, there is a positive and significant correlation between the performance of Islamic City Council of Tehran (supervision of urban management, electing mayor and approval of municipal affairs) with the extent of realization of citizenship rights. Moreover, the results of regression test indicates that among the dimensions of the Islamic City Council of Tehran, the variables of electing mayor, the supervision of urban management and approval of municipal affairs predict respectively the extent of realization of citizenship rights. Therefore, providing appropriate mechanisms to better realization of these criteria in the Islamic City Council of Tehran will help to play the best role of this institution in realizing citizenship rights in order to increase Tehrancitizens’ quality of life.