Iranian Journal of Management Studies
Volume:15 Issue: 2, Spring 2022

The purpose of this study is to examine the most important institutional factors that support the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities within the sports tourism industry. The present study is a qualitative research based on data gathered from available documentary studies and semi-structured interviews conducted with 35 experts in the field of sports tourism and sports entrepreneurship in Iran. The interpretive structural model (ISM) was used to analyze the data. According to the results of the research, 74 indicators were identified and classified under 11 institutional factors, including rule of law, government policies, social norms, social values, social beliefs, expert knowledge promotion, social knowledge promotion, public sector support, private sector support, complementary attraction, and information technology, at five hierarchical levels. Government policies and public sector support were identified as fifth-level factors that act as the model’s cornerstone. Finally, the research results suggest that for the growth of the sports tourism industry in developing countries such as Iran, other identified factors must also be involved in the growth of this industry. In this regard, the existence of an appropriate legal, normative, supportive, and educational environment will affect the ability and willingness of market participants to identify and take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities in the emerging sports tourism industry.

Identifying productive employees and analyzing their turnover by data mining tools without human intervention is an attractive research field in human resource management. This study develops an innovative auxiliary system for automatic labeling of numerical data by providing a hybrid clustering algorithm of K-means and partition around medoids (PAM) methods to identify organizational productive employees and to divide them into different productivity levels. The model is evaluated by calculating the differences between actual and labeled values (93% labeling accuracy) and an innovative criterion for image processing of the final clusters using the singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm. Ultimately, the results of the algorithm determine four labels of middle and good productive employees who leave the organization and excellent and weak productive employees who stay in the organization; according to each cluster, policies are adopted for their retaining, productivity improvement, and replacement.

This paper investigates the related literature on employee voice to propose an integrated concept of employee voice across different management areas, e.g., human resources, industrial relationships, and organizational behavior. The initial search provided 115 papers; however, the final investigation was conducted on 49 articles drawn from organizational behavior. Despite various conceptualizations of employee voice in different management disciplines, there is no evidence on different voice mechanisms as an integrated concept. The research method is a systematic review of articles based on the Wetten framework in the 1970-2019 time efficiency of employee voices in different management areas. This systematic literature review concludes that employee voice research contributes to understanding voice behavior. This study also highlights some domains, such as understanding the concept of employee voice, upon which future research can be built.

The objective of this study was to examine the effect of inventory management on financial distress with respect to the interactive role of management behavioral strains, namely overconfidence, myopia, and narcissism. The data of the study was comprised of 346 year-distressed company and 346 year-healthy company for overconfidence, 356 year-distressed company and 356 year-healthy company for myopia, and 228 year-distressed company and 228 year-Health Company for narcissism, chosen from the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange through the years 2009 to 2019. To distinguish the healthy companies from the distressed companies, the model developed by Asquith et al. (1994) was used. Findings of the study showed that the increase of inventory management efficiency leads to decreased financial distress, and the behavioral strains do not have a significant effect on the change of such a relationship.

This paper examines the effect of consumers’ perception of brand equity fit on purchase intention for focal brands in symbolic alliances through an empirical investigation of consumer-based brand equity elements. Using the signalling theory, this study empirically tested a model to examine the effect of brand equity fit between brands in a symbolic brand alliance on consumers’ purchase intentions for selected consumable products in Lagos, Nigeria. A sample of 384 supporters of the partnered brands in a symbolic brand alliance was considered for the study. The result of the ordered logistic regression indicated that brand equity has an effect on consumers’ purchase intention for the selected consumable products. The results showed that brand equity fit employed had positive significant impact on purchase intention for the brands in the symbolic alliance. The study broadens the existing studies on fit components of brand alliances. Moreover, the findings of this research provide the strategic benefit of jointly presenting a brand with another brand through a good brand equity fit.

The main goal of this study was to address the sensitivity analysis fora specific efficient decision-making unit (DMU), which is under evaluation, by the variable returns to scale (VRS) technology to extend the efficiency stability region. Variations in inputs or outputs of any DMU can change the efficiency classification of that DMU as well as other DMUs, i.e., an efficient DMU can become inefficient and vice versa. This study considered the largest performance stability region for an extreme efficient DMU whose data could be changed in all directions of input/output space, including both directions of improving the situation and worsening the situation such that under these changes, the efficiency classification of all extreme DMUs would be preserved. We found the largest symmetric cell to the center of the extreme efficient DMU under evaluation, leading to an efficiency stability radius. In addition, data changes were only applied for the extreme efficient DMU, and the data for the other DMUs were assumed fixed. This stability region was determined by the defining hyperplanes of production possibility set (PPS) of VRS technology and the corresponding half-spaces. The suggested method is illustrated using real-world data.

Few studies have examined the impact of brand logo in higher education sector. Particularly, the literature has neglected the benefits that a brand logo can have in this context. Thus, this paper outlines a framework that contributes to a greater understanding of brand logo benefits in higher education sector and extends the framework of previous studies by accounting for continuance commitment and word of mouth. We analyzed our model based on the data obtained from a sample of 340 undergraduate students from public universities in Tehran, Iran. The results indicated that the ideal self-image congruence and the brand logo benefit have a positive significant impact on commitment and word of mouth. In addition, the self-image congruence directly influences the brand logo benefit and word of mouth, and indirectly influences commitment.

Despite the fact that the concept of crowdsourcing is extensively employed by scholars, the dynamic interactions between crowd and crowdsourcer have received scant attention. This article aims to explore the successful drivers of crowdsourcing platforms by considering the role of both main sides, namely meaning crowd and crowdsourcer. The current study develops a marketing-crowdsourcing model and explores the dynamic association between the identifying variables. In the proposed model, different scenarios were considered to explore the effective mechanism for reinforcing crowd/ crowdsourcer to participate in the crowdsourcing of marketing activities. Using system dynamics relationships, casual loops, and stock and flow diagrams, this study proposes a framework for the crowdsourcing of marketing activities.

Catastrophe bonds are among the essential instruments in providing a financial hedge for insurance companies and their policyholders. Catastrophic events are rare, and the shortage of data turns using probability theory indefensible. On the other hand, uncertainty theory is a reliable alternative to deal with these kinds of indeterminacies. We model the problem of pricing catastrophe bonds as an uncertain optimization problem where the maximization of the cedent insurance company’s profit is constrained to the uncertain measure of ruin defined for the investors. Consequently, one could provide a tradeoff between being profitable for the ceding company and having reasonable protection for the investors. A solution to the optimization problem will be considered as the spread over the LIBOR, leading to a complete determination of the bond price. The results suggest the practicality of the model, especially the application of uncertainty theory in pricing catastrophe bonds. Finally, the uncertain ruin index is calculated for a real-world problem, and the results are compared with those obtained by probability theory.

Technology development, especially in petroleum industries, is one of the most important ways of economic development in oil-rich countries. However, despite such challenges as structural economic problems, the issue of moral hazards, and the conflict of interests, government policies are crucial. This study analyzed the long-term behavior of the government and the private sector as two main actors using the evolutionary game theory and solved their strategies by replicator dynamic equations. Finally, based on a real-world case in Iran, a numerical study was performed to better understand the characteristics of the game model under realistic conditions. The outputs indicate that the main approach of the government, with minimal incentive mechanisms, should be legal monitoring. Sensitivity analyses on some key parameters show that the important factor in project implementation is attention to the private sector’s revenues and expenditures, and the government’s revenues and expenditures have little effect on the outputs and behavior change.

The present study aimed at presenting the elements and characteristics of human resources’ supply and recruitment at fourth generation universities, through a mixed method and the meta-synthesis approach. The qualitative part included all related scientific works (212 retrieved works). Adopting Sandelowski and Barroso’s (2007) method, the initial screening availed 52 works, and after the second screening based on CASP, 39 documents were finally entered into meta-synthesis coding. The conceptual modeling and opinion polling stages included 12 experts and managers in the field of human resource management. Main categories’ reliability was 0.64 based on Kappa formula. The relative content validity coefficients for the categories of recruitment based on value creation for internal capacities, value increase for external talents, and cyberspace of recruitment were 1, 1, and 0.66, respectively; all greater than the minimum value (0.79). In the quantitative process that was based on descriptive and documentary methods, the analytical model of the study was proposed using the opinions of experts and evaluation of CVI-CVR. The findings confirmed the study model with 3 sub-categories, 9 concepts, and 76 codes. Finally, we maintain that the recruitment function at fourth generation universities of Iran, in accordance with the indicators of the proposed model, should be one of the priorities of the application of recruitment in the human resource management process at claimed fourth generation universities our country.

This study examined the effect of remittance inflows on human development in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member countries from 1990 to 2018. The study applied second-generation techniques. Based on the results of the second-generation unit roots test, our variables had mixed stationarity. In addition, the result of the Westerlund cointegration technique showed that long-run relationships exist among the variables. In addition, the long-run and short-run coefficients from Dynamic Common Correlated Effects (DCCE) and Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Distributive Lags (CS-ARDL) techniques revealed that remittances inflows promote human development. Moreover, it was revealed that financial development and foreign direct investment inflows positively impact human development, while the short-run coefficients were statistically insignificant. The causality test results showed a unidirectional causal link between remittance inflows and human development and between financial development and human development. In contrast, a bidirectional causal link was demonstrated between foreign direct investment and human development. Therefore, the study concluded that remittance inflows promote human development in OIC member countries. The policymakers in OIC should consider policies that will attract migrant workers to send remittances to their home country.