MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE
Year:2008 | Volume:21 | Issue:81|Papers Count:10

The accomplished researches show that in order to have better external service quality, the organizations need to have personnel (internal customers) responsibility to the objectives and visions of the organization and possess customer-oriented behaviors, and proper internal service (the satisfaction of departments with one another). In these times, after the consideration of internal marketing and internal service quality as two concepts, the importance and determining role of the internal customers in the organizations (the personnel) and the contentment of the organizational departments with one another in producing external service of high quality have been more obvious than before. Unfortunately, most of the previously done researches have been on the external service quality, so the present research was done to identify the current status of the internal marketing proceedings and the internal service quality along the external service quality realization. The descriptive- surveying research method was used. The current research results show that the internal marketing practices in the Great Tehran Gas Company are improper and the status of the internal service quality of the departments is proper and internal marketing doesn't have positive and meaningful effect on external service quality. 

Disciplined inquiry about problems of organization and management requires decision to be taken about an appropriate research deign. In making such a decision, the researcher tacitly assumes a philosophical point of view or a research paradigm. There are four research paradigms which are the basis for the selection of research methodology and research methods. These paradigms include: a) positivism, b) interpretivism ,c) critical theory ,and d) post – structuralism. The basis of quantitative research methods is positivism, and of the qualitative research methods is the other three paradigms, as mentioned above. Due to the nature and complexity of problems in organizational and management settings, neither of the quantitative and qualitative research methods, alone, would be fully appropriate to investigate them thoroughly. Therefore, there has been a shift toward applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. Such a combination is called mixed method research. Based on the above, first a review of the philosophical points of view (paradigms) which are the basis of research methods is made. Then characteristics of mixed method research are discussed. In doing so, a sample of journal articles which have applied mixed methods are examined and a typology of mixed methods are presented. 

Country-of-origin (Coo) is one of the most important external cues which influence on the customers purchase decision and has been topic of so many studies. For the same reason, the present article with taking into consideration one hundred forty two students of Isfahan University as its statistical sample, first tried to measure the influence of COO on students’ purchase decisions among the said population. The results of ANOVA test also indicate that demographic variables influence on perceived importance of COO. In second part of the research, the results of students’ evaluation about products quality of four different countries have been analyzed. The results indicate that quality of Japanese products has been perceived as the best and quality of Iranian products have been perceived the worst among the four countries has been studied.

The purpose of this article is to present a model for customer satisfaction in the development banking sector. In the design of the customer satisfaction model, an attempt has been made to consider the characteristics of the development banks. Thus, three dimensions of quality of service, characteristics of the service, and access to service have been considered as the main dimensions of the model. Using factor analysis we have identified the main factor contributing to the service characteristics that explained 60% of the variance of the data. Similarly, applying factor analysis to access to service processes we identified three factors that together explained 78.5 percent of the variance in the data, thus, providing statistical significance to our proposed model for measuring of customer satisfaction. 

As Organization Developed and the control area of management increased, assessment and control of organizational units became more essential for managers. Usually managers try to assess the performance of units by defining and measuring varied indexes in operational department. Also this method transforms some idea to managers, but doesn't attention to interrelationship between these indexes may cause some imperfect picture from the point of view. In this case we use a combination method of DEA and AHP to assessing the efficiency of Provincial organization. After identifying the input and output variables in decision making units by detecting strategic mission and responsibility of organizations, in next step by gathering the research data's in time scale of 1385 by using the output oriented BCC model with value we measure the efficiency of commercial organization. Then we rank the inefficient units by their efficiency point from the model and rank the efficient units by using the integrated model of AHP and DEA. The result of the model is identifying efficient units in according to performance measurement goal of units and the possibility of planning and strategic goal setting by model's result. 

Contrary to the most job applicants in Iran that haven't been involved with their jobs, physicians spend a large amount of time with high efficiency. Continuous hard work in clinic, college and hospital, is very stressful and it is very astonishing that physicians spend a large amount of time in such workplaces. This paper explains workaholic behaviors of physicians and their causes. Population is included physicians and professionals that work simultaneously in clinic, college and hospital. The results of the research exhibit that there is a significant correlation between personality characteristics of physicians and their workaholism. Results indicate the significant and positive causal relationship between internal locus of control, self efficacy and narcissism and negative causal relationship external locus of control with workaholism.

QFD is a mechanism for translating the voice of customer into product through various stages of product planning, engineering and manufacturing that widely implemented in modern enterprises throughout the world. In parallel with welcoming to QFD, a lot of academic efforts have gone into improving and completing this method. Now traditional methods for determining relative importance of factors in QFD have been substituted by new methods with robust mathematic foundation such as AHP and ANP. In addition, many efforts have been put into presenting systematic methods in order to determine target values of technical attributes. This paper presents a new model based on goal programming as a known MODM approach considering contradictory affects of technical attributes on customer needs that previously have not been considered. 

In this paper the issue of evaluating Iranian Oil Refineries Performance has been discussed. The research is based on math modelling by operational research techniques. To do so, of the proposed scenarios and different math programming models, a model is made by combining DEA with goal programming techniques that compared with the old classical DEA models which measures the efficiency and productivity of oil refineries more carefully. It also ranks the DMUs and measures the relative technical inefficiencies of each refinery. The research is focused on better utilization of refining processes due to the current capacities with less refining costs and ability to make more valuable oil products.