Building market oriented business units is one of the key successes for creating competitive economy. This paper presents an empirical investigation based on the implementation of factor analysis to detect important factors influencing building market oriented business units. The study designs a questionnaire including 22 questions and after verifying skewness of the data the questions were reduced to 18 and the questionnaire was distributed among 220 experts. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.789, which is well above the minimum acceptable limit and validates the results. The results of factor analysis reveal four major factors including knowledge management, customer relationship management, creativity and flexibility.

As one of the most important and fundamental issues, employment is an indicator of development and welfare in any country. Due to the rapid growth of population over the past decades in Iran, investigating unemployment and the obstacles hindering employment is of paramount importance. In this study, a questionnaire was used and a group of experts were interviewed in order to identify four groups of legal, economic, social as well as individual factors, which could improve or hinder the growth of small businesses and self-employment. In this paper, having determined the factors influencing the expansion or downsizing the small businesses, the entrepreneurs, agents supporting small businesses, and the members of employment groups in Mazandaran Province, Iran rated the four categories. Finally, the most important growth factors or challenges faced by small businesses from the three aforementioned perspectives were compared.

Customer purchasing behavior plays an essential role on marketing planning in today’s competitive environment. Immediate purchasing behavior is one of the most important components of purchasing behavior. In this paper, we use factor analysis to extract important factors influencing immediate purchasing behavior.The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire including 35 questions and through basic investigation, the questions are reduced to 21 ones. The questionnaire is distributed among 200 regular customers and 149 questionnaires have been collected. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.804, which is well above the minimum desirable level of 0.7. The survey is conducted among regular customers who normally make purchases from Shahrvand food chains in city of Tehran, Iran. The results of factor analysis reveals four major factors including intelligence pricing strategy, involvement, promotion margin and consumer behavior. The proposed study of this paper considers “intelligence pricing strategy” for the first time as an important factor in consumer’s purchasing behavior.

This study investigates the level of Narcissism among 185 Iranian auditors groups and narcissism has been used to describe people behavior in people groups. The present study uses a questionnaire to measure Narcissism and to examine the hypotheses of the paper analysis of variance and T-test are used. The results of testing hypotheses show that the level of narcissism was significantly different in auditors groups in private sector. However, in public sector, the difference between narcissistic personality in auditors’ groups is not significant. Results of the study also indicated that, in private sector, narcissistic personality in young generation of auditors was higher than audit old generation. These results confirm previous studies on narcissism indicating that narcissistic behavior was high among young generation. We suggest the Iranian association of certified public accountants (IACPA) to review the ethical training needs for auditors. In addition, audit firms can provide a system to increase interaction among old generations of auditors with young generation of auditors.

This paper presents a study to investigate the effect of university education on leadership capacity of both male and female management students of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. The data were collected from the first and the last year students using classified sampling method. The results of 116 questionnaires analyzed using SPSS software indicate that university education had a different effect on both male and female students' leadership capacity. Comparing the results of this study with other countries shows that the role of culture should be considered as an effective factor, while evaluating and comparing students' leadership capacity among communities.

Strategic assessment of the organizational performance in the industrial environment is one of the primary and essential prerequisites for developing improvement plans in organizations. This issue is so crucial that one of the on-going affairs in the organizations is to identify the weakness and strength points. One of the effective models for assessing the organizations performance is balance scorecard (BSC) model, which examines all the aspects of an organization. The proposed study of this paper investigates the existing strategic objectives in the strategy map of a pipe company located in city of Shiraz, Iran. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 31 managers, 94 regular employees and 110 customers of this firm for the fiscal year ended 2011. The results of our study indicate that the firm could reach 41.4% of its financial objectives, 87.38% of its customers’ requirements, 66.13% of internal processes and 70.94% of its learning necessities according to four major BSC requirements. In summary, the firm could reach 66.45 % of its requirements during the fiscal year of 2011.

During the past few years, there have been growing competition in banking industry in Iran and there is a growing trend on emerge of new banks, which makes it difficult for existing banks to keep market share. In this paper, we study the effect of advertisements on customers’ willingness to accept banking services based on modulatory role of brand. The proposed study has been performed among 440 randomly selected customers in city of Tehran, Iran who were doing banking business with one of Iranian banks called Parsian. The results of survey have been analyzed using structural equation modeling and the preliminary results indicate that there was a positive and meaningful relationship between brand advertisement and associate name and brand identification. However, there was no meaningful relationship between brand advertisement and customer loyalty towards to brand. In addition, the results of survey indicate there was a meaningful relationship between brand equity components including perception quality on brand name, customer awareness from brand, loyalty to brand and customers’ willingness to accept banking services on modulatory role of brand.

The present study investigates the relationship between positive and negative affectivity by the application of impression management tactics. A review on literature reveals positive affectivity has attracted less attention compared with negative affectivity. Investigated tactics in this study include supplication, ingratiation, and intimidation and threat. Results indicate that there was a positive and significant relationship between negative affectivity and application of threat, intimidation, and supplication tactics, while the relationship between negative affectivity and ingratiation tactic was negative and significant. The relationship between positive affectivity and application of threat and intimidation tactics was negative and significant. In addition, there was a positive and significant relationship between two variables of positive affectivity and application of ingratiation tactic. Furthermore, the relationship between two variables of positive affectivity and supplication tactic was negative.

In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to measure the effects of privatization on some selected firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange. The proposed study of this paper selects eleven relatively big sized Iranian firms whose structures were privatized prior year 2011. The main hypothesis of this survey studies whether there is a meaningful relationship between ownership structure and enterprise value of privatized firms. We collect the necessary information before and after privatization process completed and using a regression model examined the main hypothesis as well as five sub-hypotheses. The results of the survey indicate that the number of major shareholders has been reduced after privatization process accomplished, the number of shares had no impact on firms’ values. In addition, non-board members’ duty had not impact on firms’ value before and after privatization process, institutional investors did not play important role before and after privatization process, and separations played important role on firms’ value before and after privatization occurred.

One of the primary concerns on supply chain management is to handle risk components, properly. There are various reasons for having risk in supply chain such as natural disasters, unexpected incidents, etc. When a series of facilities are built and deployed, one or a number of them could probably fail at any time due to bad weather conditions, labor strikes, economic crises, sabotage or terrorist attacks and changes in ownership of the system. The objective of risk management is to reduce the effects of different domains to an acceptable level. To overcome the risk, we propose a reliable capacitated supply chain network design (RSCND) model by considering random disruptions risk in both distribution centers and suppliers. The proposed study of this paper considers three objective functions and the implementation is verified using some instance.