Iranian Journal of Management Studies
Volume:9 Issue: 3, Summer 2016

The aim of this study is to explore the strategic applications and limitations of Time-driven Activity-based Costing (TDABC) and to evaluate the degree of accuracy of the proponents’ arguments concerning its usefulness. In this study, published works directly related to this area from the period 2004-2015 are analyzed. This study reports TDABC's applications in strategic areas such as cost of production, unused capacity, price determination, customer profitability analysis, and modeling complex decisions in various small, medium, and large private, governmental, and nonprofit service and manufacturing organizations. However, since they are not based on any concrete empirical investigations, only future empirical studies can authentically reveal the advantages of this technique. TDABC also severely suffers from the following spheres: it lacks the ability to identify activities in the first implementation step, such as practical capacity costs rate, uniform capacity costs rate, managers’ time estimation for each activity, determination of unused capacity, as well as lack of data accuracy, and limitations of managerial decision makings. As a result of these drawbacks, proponents’ arguments regarding TDABC’s usefulness and its widespread applications -in the future and around the world- are baseless.

Nowadays, consumer trust is identified as one of the most important factors in electronic commerce (e-commerce) growth. This has led much research to investigate the role of trust in e-commerce and determine the factors which influence trust in this area. This paper explores factors which are engaged in building initial consumer trust in online shopping when a consumer wants to buy from a website for the first time. For developing the model and determining factors, data collection is conducted using questionnaire distribution for 325 respondents. After that, the validity of the proposed model is confirmed with Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In EFA, variables are categorized into 6 factors and then using CFA which is based on Structural Equations Model (SEM) the relationship between variables and factors is investigated. The results of research show that factors of Product Characteristics, Security & Reputation, Website Design Quality, Support, Purchase Characteristic, and Advertising are effective factors for building initial trust. In this study the statistical population is students of Damghan University.

In service industries, companies increasingly need to rely on the performance of their service employees to become and stay truly competitive. Despite this viewpoint, most administrators do not believe that they can make competitive advantage in their organizations through employees. Therefore, the present paper aims to study the effect of employee branding on market share based on individual and organizational values. In the present study, employee branding model was applied to banking industry. The statistical population of this paper includes the employees of Mellat Bank in Tehran. Clustering was used as a sampling method for selecting employees. The instrument for data collection was questionnaire. Totally, 410 filled questionnaires were returned. To analyze the data, Partial Least Square (PLS) was applied. The outcomes of Partial Least Square verified the fitness of the model in the studied population. In addition, the results of method analysis indicated that employee branding has a significant influence on market share.

In recent years, scholarly publishing has been faced with many distractive phenomena. Generally, most researchers are unaware of fraudulent practices now common to scholarly publishing and are at risk of becoming a victim of them. Editors also need to have sufficient knowledge about these practices. There are papers that try to increase awareness of authors about fraud in scholarly publishing, but it seems that there is no good academic resource to direct editors. In this paper, we try to present a general guideline for increasing journal quality by discussing the emerging threats to scholarly publishing and methods to avoid being victimized.

Co-movement analysis has a significant role in recourse allocation, risk management, etc. This study uses the novel approach of wavelet coherence in continuous wavelet transform framework to investigate the correlation dynamic and spillover effect of 10 main sector indices of Tehran Stock Exchange, in time and frequency domains. Analyzing the data indicates that correlation structure among TSE sectors is dynamic and varies over time. Besides, co-movements of industry indices have a multi-scale character. In other words, investors with different investment horizons would benefit differently if they diversify their portfolios via the same industries. In addition, results indicate that the spillover effect pattern is a scaled based phenomenon. This study suggests time scales of 2-32 days as the best time horizon for portfolio diversification.

An organization’s value is substantiated by consistent, high quality processes engineered in its operations and the allocation of the limited resources to achieve the desired objective. Intrinsic to the development of a process are the articulation of a coherent workflow, identification of the optimal skillset required at each stage of the process, and commissioning of the right technology platform. However, processes need to evolve with perceptible changes in the customer mindset, new technologies, exponential growth needs, and the unrelenting pressure on cost reduction. More than ever, organizations today need to institutionalize continual process improvement to avoid the risk of receding into obsolescence. While organizations choose from a menu of process improvement models, it is important to assess the maturity of the end-to-end process and to identify potential gaps and tailored solutions critically and in order. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and rank the maturity of processes in a consulting firm. To achieve this goal, a review of the literature related to the organization’s process maturity models is provided and thereafter a comprehensive model including factors and confirmed indicators is presented. It continues to assess and discuss the maturity of processes in a consulting firm.

In this paper, we revisit Donald Schön’s scholarly work on “handling uncertainty”, suggesting that in order to cope reasonably well with uncertainty, practitioners should be encouraged to take a reflective existential stance, aimed to explore their own tacit personal style (i.e., theories-in-use). They should (i) recall and reflect on their theories-in-use to bear on the phenomenon, (ii) metaphorically explore and establish analogies, and (iii) seek to frame manageable problems while (iv) coping with the anxiety this creates. They should bear in mind that there cannot be an ideal outcome. Some practical implications are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the key drivers of innovative behavior of employees in hotel industry using evidence from a developing country. Measurement items were adapted from existing scales found in the organizational behavior literature. Academic colleagues reviewed the items for face validity and readability. The scales were evaluated for reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity using data collected in a survey of 3 and 4 star hotels in Tehran, Iran. A structural equation modeling procedure was applied to examine the drivers of employees’ innovative behavior in these hotels. The research model was tested empirically using a sample of 241 respondents who worked at the hotels during the period of research. The paper found that social responsibility, employee treatment, job satisfaction, organizational support, and organizational commitment have indirectly affected innovative behavior through organizational citizenship behaviors.

This paper presents the results of tests on the weak form of Efficient Market Hypothesis applied to carbon efficient stock market indices of India, the United States of America (USA), Japan, and Brazil and their corresponding market indices which are used as their benchmark indices. In this study, Kolmogrov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests are used to test the normality of data. Run test and auto-correlation test are used to check the randomness of the data. The tests are performed using daily closing prices for the whole sample period. It is found from the statistical tests that the daily closing prices do not follow random walks in all the four countries. However, monthly returns are following random walk in case of India, USA, and Brazil, but not in case of Japan.

Credit risk estimation is a key determinant for the success of financial institutions. The aim of this paper is presenting a new hybrid model for estimating the probability of default of corporate customers in a commercial bank. This hybrid model is developed as a combination of Logit model and Neural Network to benefit from the advantages of both linear and non-linear models. For model verification, this study uses an experimental dataset collected from the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange for the period of 2008–2014. The estimation sample included 175 companies, 50 of which were considered for model testing. Stepwise and Swapwise least square methods were used for variable selection. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model for credit rating classification outperform the Logit model and Neural Network. Considering the available literature review, the significant variables were gross profit to sale, retained earnings to total asset, fixed asset to total asset and interest to total debt, gross profit to asset, operational profit to sale, and EBIT to sale.