Iranian Journal of Management Studies
Volume:14 Issue: 4, Autumn 2021

Digital transformation plays a critical role in the way organizations undertake their businesses. To deliver a successful digital transformation and increase productivity, organizations should rethink their digital employee experience (DEX) and improve it. This paper aims to conceptualize the concept of DEX, identify its components and sub-components, and present a conceptual framework for this concept. This qualitative study was primarily based on a two-phase research methodology. In the first phase, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted in academic resources and grey literature. The second phase was then conducted to approve or modify the results of the first phase of research. In the second phase, eleven semi-structured, face-to-face, long interviews were held with eleven experts of digital transformation and human resource (HR) domains. The outcome of this study is a definition and a framework with eight components and 70 sub-components about DEX. The results of this study might guide organizations to improve DEX in workplaces and rethink their relationship with their employees to survive in the current competitive business environment.

Nowadays, high voluntary turnover intention among Millennials has presented new challenges for organizations although it is unclear how the tendency to leave the organization has varied across generations and is significantly dominant among Millennials. This study aims to examine the effect of psychosocial factors including value, attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control on turnover intention, and specifically targets Iranian generations since they have been studied less in the workplace. The current study employed a descriptive cross-sectional survey procedure and randomly sampled 498 full-time workers from a large automotive company in Tehran. The direct assessment of the association between variables showed that extrinsic value has a significant and positive effect on turnover intention while the intrinsic value is not significantly associated with turnover intention. However, indirectly, intrinsic value orientation significantly contributes to a low turnover intention through the mediating effect of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control, and extrinsic value is related to a high turnover intention through attitude and subjective norm but not through perceived behavioral control. Eventually, multi-group analysis revealed that the strength and direction of the relationship between value and turnover intention differ depending on generational cohorts in an Iranian social context.

The staff is the most important contributor to the development of an organization. A new approach in modern organizations is personal branding. This study aimed to design a personal branding model for the staff of the Iranian Judiciary with an emphasis on organizational training. Building on a qualitative approach and grounded theory, the study incorporated faculty members and specialists in the field of personal branding and human resource management as its statistical population. Sixteen individuals were recruited via purposive sampling and were subsequently interviewed. Strauss and Corbin’s systematic approach was employed to analyze the data. According to the conceptual model, personal branding was the axial phenomenon in the model, while effective communication, professionalism, individual dynamics, creative thinking, ethical behavior, and individual characteristics were the causal conditions, organizational culture and climate and environmental factors were contextual factors, constructive negotiations, service compensation system, perceptual skill, and human resource management system were intervening conditions, knowledge management, preservation of human resources, the strategic plan, personal brand management, performance management, organizational dynamics, staff training system, and resiliency were strategic factors, and the administrative system health, self-improvement, idealism, human resources productivity, and optimization of decision-making were the consequences of the research model.

Entrepreneurial emotions are able to motivate students in the process of starting a business or undertaking entrepreneurial activities. Different emotions are involved in the entrepreneurship process that affect their engagement in start-up. Hence, this study aims to determine the positive and negative effects of entrepreneurial emotions towards start-up process behavior among university students. A total of 472 final year students in Malaysian public universities were involved in the study. To analyze the data obtained, the researchers performed confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modeling using AMOS software. The results showed that both positive and negative entrepreneurial emotions had a significant effect on the business start-up process behavior among the students. Positive emotions of these students towards the business start-up process motivated them to engage in entrepreneurial activities, while negative emotions were found to give the opposite result. Therefore, the findings are useful for entrepreneurship lecturers to ensure more interactive teaching techniques to attract students to become job creators.

Constant development and change in the supply chain lead the system to meet various risks. Thus, a proper procedure should be adopted to cope with such issues. This study addresses a bi-objective model to design a resilient and robust forward supply chain under uncertainty and multiple disruptions. The investigated objective functions include minimizing the total cost and the total non-resiliency of the network, which is tackled using the ε-constraint method. Notably, resilience strategies and two-stage stochastic programming are respectively considered to cope with disruption and operational risks. Ultimately, some random numerical benchmarked examples are applied to the model to confirm the proposed formulation’s performance. The results indicate that considering risks in the system leads to increased costs, but it would be profitable in the long term. Notably, a resilient chain can prevent system failure and enhance capabilities to reduce risk exposure costs and damages.

The present research aims to explore the relation between export strategic orientation – including export market orientation and export learning orientation – and export performance by investigating the mediating role of innovation and the moderating role of internationalization. The food and agricultural products exporting firms participating in the 26th International Agrofood Exhibition in Tehran are considered as the statistical population, estimated 760 domestic firms. Finally, 296 questionnaires were filled by export managers, business managers, employees of business and export departments, and executives. The sampling method was systematic random sampling. Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM) using Smart PLS software. Results show that the rise in export market orientation and innovation are associated with the increase in the export performance. Moreover, the research indicates that while export learning orientation decreases export performance directly, the export performance tends to increase if export learning orientation leads to a high level of innovation. In addition, innovation was found to mediate partially the relationship between both aspects of strategic orientations and export performance. Finally, the moderating effect of the degree of internationalization in the relationship between export market orientation and export performance is confirmed.

Work-family interface that covers family and work reciprocal relations includes both aspects of negative and positive interactions of people’s work and family lives. This article deals with the analysis of the antecedents and consequences of positive aspects among faculty members. Specifically, the study investigated the effect of flexible working arrangements on work and family enrichment with the moderating role of gender and self-efficacy. In addition, the relationship between work-family enrichment and job involvement, organizational identification, and family satisfaction was tested. The survey questionnaires were distributed to the faculty members of four premium universities in Tehran, and the structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses. The results showed that flexible working arrangements have a significant positive effect on family to work enrichment (FWE) and work to family enrichment (WFE). Moreover, WFE was found to have a significant positive effect on job involvement, organizational identification, and family satisfaction. On the other hand, the effects of FWE on job involvement and family satisfaction were confirmed; however, FWE did not have any significant effect on organizational identification. The moderating role of self-efficacy in the relationship between flexible working arrangement and FWE was confirmed, while the moderating role of gender in the relationship between flexible working arrangement and work-family enrichment (in both directions) was rejected. As a major conclusion, it can be said that in the academic community of Iran, flexible working arrangements can still be used to enrich work and family life and perhaps achieve a higher level of work-family balance.

The news contains information about the fundamentals of the company and can change the behavior of the stock market. However, most research in stock market prediction has relied on technical analysis, i.e., time series analysis, based on past stock data, and the impact of fundamental data – especially Persian news – on the stock prices has been neglected. Consequently, this study aimed to fill this gap. To this aim, the stock index values were collected from the Tehran Stock Exchange along with the news published during this period. Then, the semantic load of news sentences was determined using text mining and sentiments analysis techniques, and the news was classified into positive and negative categories using machine-learning algorithms. Finally, the relationship between news and stock index was evaluated using logistic regression. According to the results, published news has a positive or negative semantic burden, and is effective on the index value.

Banks and financial institutions strive to develop and improve their credit risk evaluation methods to reduce financial loss resulting from borrowers’ financial default. Although in previous studies, many variables obtained from financial statements – such as financial ratios – have been used as the input to the bankruptcy prediction process, seldom a machine learning method based on computing intelligence has been applied to select the most critical of them. In this research, the data from companies that are were listed in Tehran’s Stock Exchange and OTC market during 26 years since 1992 to 2017 has been investigated, with 218 companies selected as the study sample. The ant colony optimization algorithm with k-nearest neighbor has been used to feature the selection and classification of the companies. In this study, the problem of the imbalanced dataset has been solved with the under-sampling technique. The results have shown that variables such as EBIT to total sales, equity ratio, current ratio, cash ratio, and debt ratio are the most effective factors in predicting the health status of companies. The accuracy of final research model is estimated that the bankruptcy prediction ranges between 75.5% to 78.7% for the training and testing sample.

The current study aimed to apply the psychological life space theory to provide a comprehensive framework for the conceptualization of customer well-being in the banking field. A grounded theory including open, axial, and selective coding was employed. Theoretical sampling was applied to select candidates for an in-depth interview, and data gathering was done by purposive sampling followed by selective sampling. By following a qualitative approach, a deeper insight was provided about the role of banks in different domains of customers’ lives. The obtained results revealed that primary brand associations could enhance customer well-being by affecting six subdomains of customers’ lives, including consuming, social, communal, business, religious, and daily life spheres. Besides, it was found that five different images, namely, brand image, self-image, user image, bank’s employee image, and bank’s competitor image inside customers’ mind, could contribute to the changes in the customer well-being. This study contributes to the literature by proposing a new framework including new concepts and consequently, new relationships. Finally, managerial implications along with limitations are discussed.