Motivation is one of the most important factors influencing workers & apos; productivity. An increase in workers & apos; motivation could add more value to organizations & apos; structure and influence the profitability, significantly. In this paper, we study different factors on demotivating workers using questionnaire consist of various questions. The questionnaire is distributed among some employees who work for rubber production units located in Esfahan, Iran. The results of this survey indicate that discrimination on annual job compensation, entrusting responsibilities and unpleasant relationship with family partner are some of the most important factors influencing employees & apos; motivation. While financial factors play important role on increasing employees & apos; motivation, non-financial factors are considered more important.

Empowering workers play an essential role on increasing productivity in any organization. The service industries such as insurance companies or banks mostly rely on their own people to retain their customers and incomes. The recent increasing trend on the number of private banks in Iran has increased competition among existing banks. The banking industry strives to empower its employees as much as possible in an attempt to maintain market share by not losing its customers. In this paper, we present an empirical study to detect the most important factors empowering bank employees. The study is implemented for a recently established private bank with 228 people with 32 questions where 15 questions are focused on empowering employees. The results are analyzed using statistical tests and descriptive methods. The results indicate that leadership, academic qualification, appropriate policy and strategy, cooperation and processes play important role on empowering and enabling bank & apos; s employee.

Spirituality and ethics play important roles in bringing justice for many business units. During the past few years, there has been growing concern on thinking about profitability without considering other aspects such as spirituality. The infamous Enron incident has been a crystal clear of a case of thinking just on short-term profitability without considering other ethical issues. Spirituality helps organizations create ethical values, responsibility and job satisfaction among workers and these issues could increase business competitive advantages. In this paper, we study the impact of spirituality on different levels of individual, workspace and organizational for a real-world case study. The survey results of this paper indicate that spirituality could significantly impact the organization in different levels.

One of the primary concerns of many corporate organizations is to assess the weakness and strength of their future partners in an attempt to reduce all potential risks involved with them. In this paper, we present a BSC-DEA based model to indentify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a firm. The proposed model of this paper assumes there are various uncertainties associated with all input/output parameters and uses fuzzy numbers to handle the uncertainties. We also consider a real-world case study of banking industry where four major banks are possible candidates of a partnership and implement the proposed model of this paper for this case study. The results of this study reveal some of the issues such as weakness of electronic banking, services and resource allocation as part of their infrastructure problems.

The new millennium has commenced with an increase awareness of precious value of human resources. Many large firms have increased to use new human resources mobilization policies and the importance of human potential in business has developed, dramatically. There different methods to help human resources increase their potentials such as providing recreational centers, athletic facilities, etc. In this paper, we study the impact of providing exercise facilities on improving the efficiency of employees in management level in the biggest steel producers in Iran called Mobarakeh Steel Complex. In this company, there were about 85 middle level managers and supervisors and the proposed study selects 30 people, randomly and divides them into two equal groups. In the first stage of the study, questionnaire of vocational relation are distributed among the participants of our experiment and we measure some important factors, which could improve vocational relationships. Next, the experimental groups are invited to take part in some selective aerobic programs for 8 weeks and 3 sessions per week and 1 hour and 15 minutes per session, regularly. Finally, we repeat the same experiments after the aerobic programs end and compare the results with the first one. The preliminary results indicate that there is a meaningful difference between the healthcares of these two groups.

In this paper, we present an empirical study on measuring the effects of training programs on efficiency of university employee. The proposed model of this paper uses Kirkpatrick four level models based on some questionnaire. The questions are divided into four different groups of reflection, leaning, behavior and efficiency and the feedback are collected using Likert scales. We perform some statistical tests to analyze the results and conclude that staff training has relatively positive impact on all four items. In addition, the effects of different personal characteristics such as age, gender and marriage conditions are investigated on all four levels of Kirkpatrick & apos; s model. The results indicate that the Kirkpatrick could be implemented for measuring the effects of training programs, efficiently.

In this paper, we propose a method to measure the relative efficiency of different units of a publicly traded bank using data envelopment analysis. The study also measures the productivity of different banks using Malmquist index and the results are compared with relative efficiency of banks. The proposed model uses nine financial factors reported by the bank officials for both studies where five items are used for efficiency measurement and the other four items are used for productivity measurement. The results indicate that different banks perform inefficient in terms of efficiency but they have attempted to increase their productivity. We also analyze the results and give guidelines on how inefficient units could increase their efficiency by reducing their inputs or increasing their outputs

In this paper, we propose a multi criteria decision making technique to determine an efficient solution for quadratic assignment problem. The proposed method of this paper considers transportation cost, adjacency and separation as the most important criteria to find the efficient layout. A tabu search is used to generate a set of feasible solutions and for each solution, we evaluate various criteria. The proposed model of the paper uses DEA technique to choose the most efficient units among the feasible solutions. The implementation of the proposed method is demonstrated using some benchmark problems and the results are discussed in details.

This paper presents an empirical study on measuring relative efficiencies of test drive
educational organizations using data envelopment analysis. The study uses a Delphi method to
determine the most important input/output factors and then gathers the actual data for all units
located in an Iranian province called Zanjan. The results of the implementation of the DEA
method are compared for different periods of the recent year and they are analyzed. We perform
the DEA implementation for two separate regions, one for the units located inside the city and
the other for the units located in the rural area. The output results of both methods are compared
and the results are discussed in details.

Measuring the relative efficiency of similar units has been an open research for years. Data en-velopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used among researchers for efficiency measurement. DEA uses different inputs/outputs to measure the relative efficiency of one unit compared with other similar units. This paper presents a comprehensive review on recent applications of DEA techniques on measuring the relative efficiency of project management units. The study covers the implementation of DEA method for measuring the relative efficiency of enterprise resources planning, research and development and construction projects.