A significant amount of literature specifies that there are benefits for having a favorable brand personality, such as purchase intentions and enhanced brand attitudes and higher degrees of consumer trust and loyalty. Brand differentiation is one of most important issues to handle competition in the hostile marketplace. A reliable solution for establishing the distinctiveness of a brand is through brand personality. This study analyzes the personality of Adidas, Nike and Puma brands in Iran using Aaker,s brand personality dimensions [Aakar (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Resources, 24, 347–356]. First, data are collected using a questionnaire designed based on Aaker,s model. Second, the K-S and Friedman tests are done to analyze the collected data. Results indicate that in terms of sincerity and competence, Adidas scores are higher than two other brands. Nike in point of view of excitement, and Puma in terms of sophisticated and ruggedness dimensions have higher position in comparison to other brands.

The aim of this research is to analyze the role of the staff’s wellbeing stated as independent variable and the work locus of control as the moderator factor associated with the organizational commitment and the staff’s wellbeing. To accomplish the objective, we used regression analysis. The research focuses on the one’s ability to predict the staff’s wellbeing and it studies the effects of the work locus of control as a moderator on the organizational commitment. Findings of the research show that the staff’s wellbeing maintains a negative relationship with the continuance commitment and a positive relation with the affective and normative commitments. Moreover, the impact of the work locus of control, as moderator, on the relationship between the staff’s wellbeing and their organizational commitment relational and has some necessities. Thus, the findings of the research are in a state of continual changes.

Employment of supply chain management could impact the entire functional and practical aspects of industry and services positively and change the manager’s attitude toward the implementation of supply chain management systems from a cost-oriented attitude to an enabling attitude towards better activities with other chain members. Yet still many organizations do not have the required vision within the identification of strategic appropriate measure in implementation, evaluation and usage of proper benchmarks to attain an integrated chain. Constantly supply chain management activity can be introduced as a tied up with strategic level of organization. Hence, it is a necessary with an overall strategic approach to identify the criteria, which enable us to include the whole process level of chain, financial matter of chain activities, visible and invisible properties, human activity and turn all these activities into an integrated approach to resolve supply chain difficulties. In this paper, we present an integrated balanced score card combined with DEMATEL technique to prioritize different alternatives for supply chain implementation.

Human resources development is one of the management functions that are aimed at maximizing the return on the investments. It is a combination of training and education that ensure continual improvement and growth of all stakeholders. The growth witnessed in banking sector of Nigeria has been attributed to many factors among which are the human resources available. The influx of human resources into the banking sector from different disciplines and observed restrictions on employees have necessitated the need for human resources development. Therefore, an attempt is made with this research to investigate the human resources development situation in the sector, with a study of one thousand employees of different commercial banks selected, randomly. Data was collected with a well structured questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Hypotheses formulated were tested with t-test and the result shows that manpower from different disciplines are employed in Nigerian banking sector, the sectors has absorbed many from labour market, the new entrants are trained at inception, an average employee in commercial bank hardly has time for personal development effort.

During the past few years, there have been significant interests in using information technology in educational systems. There is no doubt that there are different advantages associated with the implementation of information technology in educational systems. However, there are also some barriers in having successful implementation of IT in educational universities. This paper performs an empirical study to learn more on advantages and barriers on successful implementation of IT in governmental universities in Iran. The study distributes 101 questionnaires among a population of university professors who worked for two universities in city of Esfahan, Iran. The results of survey indicates that three factors including lack of good standards, sufficient infrastructure and good support on behalf of private sectors are the most important challenges for IT implementation. On the advantages, instructors and students & apos; abilities to find their needs using different search engines, increase in their communication skills and self-confidence are the most important factors detected by this survey.

The purpose of this paper is to determine comparative ranking of agricultural development in different provinces of Iran using taxonomy technique. The independent variables are amount of annual rainfall amount, the number of permanent rivers, the width of pastures and forest, cultivated level of agricultural harvests and garden harvests, number of beehives, the number of fish farming ranches, the number of tractors and combines, the number of cooperative production societies, the number of industrial cattle breeding and aviculture. The results indicate that the maximum development coefficient value is associated with Razavi Khorasan province followed by Mazandaran, East Azarbayjan while the minimum ranking value belongs to Bushehr province.

The success of each organization depends undoubtedly on the quality of its management and management quality depends on decision quality and information quality on the quality of its measurement and proportion. Therefore, its accuracy and measurement has a key role in the success of the organization and the weakness of performance evaluation and managerial control system can transfer to a barrier for the growth of organization. Performance evaluation systems are now dividable to two traditional group (performance evaluation of an individual across reminding him about his performance) and modern group (developing and improving the capacity of evaluated individual and inclined to achievement of organizational objectives and strategies). One of the most authoritative strategic models in this field is the balanced scorecard (BSC) model in which entire aspects of an organization are dominantly investigated. However, no operational trend has been introduced for utilizing it up to now. In this paper, an operational trend is introduced to apply the foundations of BSC model and multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. The most important goal of researchers in representation of new structure for creating development and growth capacity and permanent improvement is associated by a kind of providence, such that it can develop desirable organizational and work behaviors towards achieving the objectives and strategies of the organization. In addition, the strategic planning of Islamic Azad university of Semnan was modeled by suggested structure to validate the suggested structure & apos; s capacities. The results showed that outputs were more tangible for the personnel of the organization and the results were accepted by the managers of Islamic Azad university of Semnan.

Outsourcing is known as using a supplier outside the organization in a way that this supplier provides the same service or goods provided normally inside the organization. Outsourcing likewise any other strategy has its own effects on the organization. This paper tries to evaluate the impact of a successful outsourcing on organization’s activities in selected universities. In order to reach this purpose, after theoretical studies, first, obtained indexes by the expertise are evaluated and then by the confirmatory factor analysis with the help of Lisrel software, the claimed indexes are confirmed. The results of structural equation show that the questioned relevance is directly available and in some other words the implementation of a successful outsourcing will help improving organization’s activities in the statistical.

There used to be an assumption that any conflict has negative and destructive influences and we must remove it from the system. However, recent studies indicate that conflict is the result of interaction with different people having various personalities, social and cultural behaviors and this is an unavoidable issue. The existence of conflict is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, there are many evidences, which show that organizations with no conflict may fail. In other words, people who work for business units with no conflict are most likely so disparate that they cannot fit themselves to environmental conditions. In this paper, we discuss how to handle a conflict in any organization and lead the business units to organizations that are more productive.

In order to prepare students for the workforce, academic programs incorporate a variety of tools that students are likely to use in their future careers. One of these tools employed by business and technology programs is the integration of live software applications such as SAP through the SAP University Alliance (SAP UA) program. Since the SAP UA program has been around for only about 10 years and the available literature on the topic is limited, research is needed to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the SAP UA program. A collaborative study of SAP UA faculty perceptions of their SAP UAs was conducted in the fall of 2011. Of the faculty invited to participate in the study, 31% completed the online survey. The results indicate that most faculty experienced difficulty implementing SAP into their programs and report that a need exists for more standardized curriculum and training, while a large percentage indicated that they are receiving the support they need from their schools and SAP.