MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE
Year:2007 | Volume:20 | Issue:78|Papers Count:9

The current work studies the role played by managers’ mental models in organizational change processes. In particular, we consider managers’ attitudes to organizational changes and how they influence decisions to initiate such changes. We have based our empirical analysis on the opinions of the managers of the Iranian large tissue manufacturing, obtained through a questionnaire. Our findings show that managers’ evaluations of organizational change processes- whether favorable or unfavorable- condition their decision to initiate them. Likewise, we find manager’ evaluations of change processes will depend on the degree of acceptance and on its expected long-term effects.

With regards to ICT initiatives and wide application of these technologies in offering services to citizens, E-government development is passing to its final phases. Hence, application of ICT in the area of elections is a strategic necessity. This study uses factor analysis to discover prerequisites of E-elections in Iran. The study integrates constructs from literature to develop a model of assessment. A survey is administered to 197 electoral administrators. The data is analyzed using factor analysis. The study only explores the perceptions of electoral administrators. Future studies could use the model to assess perceptions of a more diverse pool of citizens. Results indicate that electronic governance, technological infrastructure, human resource, Security, and Reliability mechanisms are prerequisites to run a successful electronic-voting system in Iran. The model explains 60 percent of the variance in implementation of an e-voting system. Government should emphasize the benefits of electronic voting to citizens. If government follows a step-by step program to develop appropriate mechanisms with regards to findings of this research, e-voting may be influential enough to motivate people to participate in the election process. The findings of this study also lay the foundation for future studies on e-voting adoption.

Inter-organizational relationships have a rich background in business. This is due to increasing competition on one hand, and dramatic improvement in production, marketing, and information technologies on the other hand. Almost all organizations rely on their relationship with other counterparts and receive a significant benefit for their business success. Different organizations have preferred various forms to adapt this idea including Joint venture, Networking, Consortia, Trade association, and Interlocking Directorate. These forms have a profound theoretical background and it is crucial to understand these theories in order to take the appropriate form. This paper reviews the main theoretical paradigms including Transaction cost economics, Resource dependence, Strategic alliances, Stakeholder theory, Learning theory, and Institutional theory along with their strengths and weaknesses. The analysis suggests that there is no single influential theory on all the popular forms and a contingency approach should be adopted for successful implementation of the inter-organizational relationship management.

The main goal of this research is study of government policies and related organizations in tourism industry in the third economic and cultural plan (because of its coincidence with its form, a functional system of policy making, resulting in the sustainable development of a country's tourism industry. The results of the research show that the policies of tourism industry in each of five-year plans namely the third development plan, have suffered due to lack of a model for predefined policy makings and specially lack of attention to basic policy making indices like centralization and coherence in goals, systematic, and integrated perspective among the policy makers, the extent of practicality of policies, and effective responsive system and a system for performance evaluation. Tourism development requires close consideration of development dimensions in all individual, organizational and national levels, and permanence of this development depends on utilization of resources, directing investments, orientation of technology development and a structural and fundamental change compatible with now and future needs of humanity. In this research, government policies in diplomatic, economic, cultural, and educational dimensions have been investigated. Tourism scholars believe that the path for achievement of sustainable development of tourism is feasible only through working on the following two groups: - Primary indices of policy making apart from the subject of tourism. - Professional branches of tourism In the accomplished model the role and importance of any of the indices have been predicted. Moreover lack of a scientific basis in policy making resulted in consideration of this inefficiency in the model. The suggested model defines some goals at three levels: individual, organizational and national, and it is hoped that through fulfilling the goals of development in the above three; we may reach to a permanent development of tourism.

Logistic and Supply chain have emerged as an important factor in creating value for companies wanting to reduce costs, increase asset productivity and improve customer relationships .In each supply chain, the companies try to improve their operations and systems, so in the first step they should find the answers for two questions: first, what are their opportunities to improve their operations, and, witch one has more added value for them, by considering their limitation. The diagnostic process helps them to find the answers for these kinds of question. The purpose of this paper is to expand and present one conceptual model for logistic diagnostic. Here, after analyzing other related models, the expanded model will be explained. Organizations can analysis their operations and systems by using this approach.

This paper presents two approaches for evaluating Service Quality in a company by a customer satisfaction survey. The first approach is based on the statistical survey by the customer satisfaction measurement and the second is based on the statistical quality control method. The later method has been rarely used in such researches. The theoretical base is SERVQUAL model. In this survey three dimensions were generally defined in order to measure service quality and it was analytically considered whether it is suitable to use these dimensions or not. Then 18 factors (3 overall satisfaction factors and 15 factors which affect the overall satisfaction) were identified and also were surveyed. The data related to customers' attitudes of received services are gathered of about 30/000 customers in 15 successive months (2000 customers per month) out of statistical populations under consideration. Finally, the trends of customer's perception of these services during the survey were studied. The results of our research showed that using the feedbacks of these two approaches would cause increasing customers' satisfication and also decreasing dissatisfaction obviously. 

Assessment of training quality needs particular methods because of its essence. In this article among various Techniques of evaluation and ranking, a modern method in quality assessment of training periods is presented. According to preference and finding the importance measure of quality training indicators, we used hierarchical analysis process (AHP) to prioritize and find training quality indexes. For evaluation performance of each training course based on training quality indexes, data collecting and summarizing has been performed by fuzzy sets theory. Finally TOPSIS method has been used to rank and compare training courses.