فصلنامه فرایند مدیریت و توسعه
سال بیست و سوم شماره 2 (پیاپی 74، پاییز و زمستان 1389)

Development plans are strategic documents for any country’s advancement and development. Given the importance of the role, goals and status of development plans, it is highly pivotal to evaluate the performance of various sectors within such plans. This article tries to measure the efficiency of Iran’s power supply companies. The statistical population consists of 38 Iranian power supply companies. Classical and stochastic Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models were used in order to measure the efficiency and evaluate performance of power supply companies. The results indicate that out of the total resources allocated to the companies concerned, considering definite (stochastic data), in average 77 (74) percent of the resources are sufficient for the functions of Iran’s power supply units to make them technically efficient. In other words, about 23 (26) percent of the companies resources are not optimally used and wasted within the period of the study. As it could be deducted that other sectors have approximately the same situations, it is recommended that it should be necessary to measure the efficiency and productivity of public sectors in every year of the Fifth Development Plan. Doubtlessly, the result of this policy would provide incentives for more efficiency and productivity in various sectors of the society. Moreover, it could lead to better use of resources and saving national wealth.

The development of technology has had various and vast impacts on the different aspects of human life. Telecommuting is a modern work arrangement with different advantages at the individual and organizational level. This paper aims to make estimation for telecommuting based on organizational characteristics, particularly organizational position and organizational unit. After a review of the pertaining literature, the proposed methodology is presented, followed by data gathering and field study. Results of the study indicate that 1.66 days telecommuting per week for the sample of government employees is suitable. It is also concluded that at least one day telecommuting per week is suitable for every organizational unit.

Materializing ideals such as expediting infrastructural and civil development affairs, economic growth and development, employment, investment as well as commodities production and exports is a goal for Iran’s free trade zones. This study tries to determine the factors influencing the performance of Iran’s free zones and analyze their effectiveness degree. The findings indicate that 49 percent of changes in the functions of free trade zones are originated from the following five factors: 1) Administrative and policy-related obligations; 2) Environmental factors; 3) Transparency of rules and regulations; 4) Strategic orientations; 5) Financing mechanisms.

In today's world that wonderful changes and developments perpetually occur in various areas, especially in information technology, the environment has undergone extreme instability and competitions have become very intensive. Therefore, to be successful in competitions, organizations should be futuristic and use environment-oriented planning in a way that they would be able to identify environmental changes and factors, and analyze their impacts on the organization as well as how the organization should interact with them in a long-term horizon. This type of planning is in fact strategic planning in which the environment's opportunities and threats as well as intra-organizational strengths and weaknesses are identified through examining the environments within and outside the organization while keeping in mind the missions of the organization, long-run goals are defined for the organization; in order to hit these goals, it chooses a strategy from among strategic options that emphasizing the strengths and undermining weaknesses, seizes the opportunities optimally and avoids threats in a way to lead to organizational success in competition (Aghazadeh, 2004). As information technology (IT) is now considered as an opportunity and threat in organizations, the corporations that work in the filed of information technology especially producing software, can take advantage of the strategic planning. Hence, considering the need for strategic planning vis-à-vis the new environment, this paper tries to implement the strategy with the SWOT method for this company. To achieve this goal, information was collected about the opportunities and threats as well as the strengths and weaknesses of company through questionnaires and interviews with company founders and the following results were reached: The primary advisable strategy for the company is that it should invest on “products and services innovation strategy”. Beside the company may put “market expansion strategy”, i.e. in Iran and later in the world, on the agenda.

The purpose of this study is to determine the factors related to employee's participation in manager's decision making in a governmental organization. A couple of queries were posed, i.e., “to what extent employees participate in manager's decision-making?” and “Is there a relationship between gender, education, age and job experience of employees and their participation in manager's decision-making?” To reply them, a questionnaire composed of 38 items, was set. After interacting with academics and experts concerned in order to check the face validity of the questionnaire, its validity was estimated and confirmed by the value of %95 using Cronbach alpha. A number of 330 people out of 680 permanent employees of statistical population were selected using Morgan table through random sampling method. At the end of the questionnaire administration, statistical calculation was performed on 240 completed questionnaires. The data were analyzed by SPSS statistical software using one sample T-Test sub-program, Chi-square model as well as simultaneous regression. The result of the study shows that the rate of employee's participation in manager's decision-making is lower than average and that except for gender and organizational position; there were no significant relationship between employee's age, education, job experience and their participation in manager's decision-making.

This study uses time series data related to employment, wages, capital costs and value added to estimate labor demand function in aggregate economics in three sectors, i.e. service, industry and agriculture categorized by skilled and unskilled and in service sub-sectors. So as to anticipate economy globalization impacts on employment in the framework of three outcomes namely capital entrance, trade liberalization and information and communication technologies (ICT) growth, two other variables, i.e. economy openness and the capital stock in transportation and telecommunication sectors are added to the model. The results indicate that the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) growth on employment is positive while the impact of trade liberalization or economy openness level was intangible; the impact of capital entrance, owing to capital-labor complementary relationship, is evaluated as positive. Therefore the result of the three outcomes mentioned as a whole on employment is considered positive. Moreover, the positive impacts of these indicators on skilled labor are more than that of unskilled labor. Besides, the positive role of economy openness level in skilled labor employment in the service sector is ranked the first. As far as service sub-sectors are concerned, it could be claimed that our banking and insurance systems as well as transportation and telecommunication systems not only would be affected in interaction with global economy, but the way would be paved for the increase of businesses and employment opportunities in these sectors.