Sharif Digital Repository

Women are going to play more important roles in the economy of most countries including Iran. Hence, since the number of entrepreneurs among women is increasing, identifying characteristics and other factors that cause these group to be successful, is a critical issue. Studies show that entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, face numerous problems in their career. These problems are especially more demanding in societies with unique cultural attributes. Therefore, applying personal and managerial solutions in order to overcome these problems are necessary. On the other hand, researchers believe that one of the most effective and beneficial concepts helping entrepreneurs in their... 

Self-leadership” is a process through which individuals control their performance and lead themselves by using specific behavioral and cognitive strategies (Manz, 1986; Manz and Neck, 2004). This concept includes a toolkit of behavioral activities borrowed from social cognitive theory and goal setting. It also includes constructive thought processes that have been extensively studied in sports psychology. Scholars have categorized the SL (self-leadership) strategies into three main categories; behavioral, natural reward and constructive thought Strategies. (Neck and Houghton, 2006) Given the growing importance of self-leadership in contemporary organizations operating in an increasingly... 

The construction industry is viewed as one with poor performance from the point of view of quality as compared to other industries such as service and manufacturing. Earlier field studies performed in Iran show low construction quality. Experts suggest that cultural factors are among the most important factors that lead to the difference between what is planned and what is constructed.
Unlike many other industries, the construction industry is yet to achieve wide-scale automation of processes. Therefore, majority of construction processes is heavily dependent on workers. In order to achieve higher performance in terms of quality and productivity, the practitioners and researchers should... 

The present study examines the effects of participation in a critical reflective online course upon the participants’ identity. The study drew upon both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The 38 participants of the study who were first degree students at Sharif University of Technology participated in ten online sessions in which ten prompts concerning intercultural issues were introduced. The data collected in the online course underwent inductive qualitative content analysis which resulted in the extraction of five themes. Following this, 18 participants were interviewed to throw more light on these findings. Qualitative and Quantitative content analyses of the data... 

Intercultural Communicative Competence has been the focus of much academic inquiries in the field of second/foreign language learning in the last decades since learners’ ability to communicate authentically in the target language has been recognized among the scholars. This study aimed to address this issue in the Iranian academic environment where there was almost a gap in not touching the cultural issues of target language in a focused and organized manner in language classes at universities. For that purpose, an intercultural syllabus was designed for a 14-week course of English short story in the Minor Program at Sharif University of Technology. The syllabus was an integration of various... 

This mixed-method study explored the intercultural competence of a group of engineering university students in Sharif University of Technology enrolling in a “Listening and Speaking” class, minoring in English. The aims of this study were first to assess the initial ICC level of the participants, second to evaluate the effect of a culture-based syllabus on ICC development of the learners, third to measure the variation of their L1 cultural identity of the students after the course, fourth to discover recursive themes in the assignments and recorded interviews with the participants and fifth to measure the learners’ satisfaction with the developed syllabus. Quantitative data was derived from... 

Alpha amylase enzyme is one of the most important enzymes used in a wide range of industries. The enzyme is used in industries such as detergents, food, pharmaceuticals, paper making and textile. Various national and international articles have been published on this enzyme that focused on specific targets. Despite the extensive studies carried out in this area inside the country, there is still no industrial production of alpha amylase and other enzymes in our country. In the view of the fundamental problem of the lack of industrialization of these studies, in addition to the lack of a riskier investor, it seems that there is a lack of industrial vision in these studies.In this study, the... 

Guilt aversion, the process of avoiding guilt, when guilt indicates the human sense which is present when they let down other's expectations. As the definition suggests, guilt is related to what one thinks of the others’ thoughts; i.e. the second-order beliefs. Incomplete information models of guilt aversion are the most reliable ones in the literature due to economic experiments. Based on these models, the dictator game and the trust game are applied to measure the degree of guilt aversion. In both the above psychological games, there are two players where Player A has the power to decide about the split of the money. We use the amount of transferred money to Player B is as a sign of guilt...