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The uniqueness of the pre-hospital setting and the need for quick decision-making confronts pre-hospital emergency personnel with various moral conflicts that can lead to moral distress (MD) in them. This study aimed to design a valid scale for the assessment of MD in emergency medical service (EMS) staff.

This exploratory mixed-method study was conducted among the EMS provider's community. In the qualitative section, data were gathered and analyzed with semi-structured interviews and conventional content analysis, respectively. The initial pool of items was formed and the primary scale was designed. In the quantitative section, a methodological study was carried out to determine the psychometric properties of the scale including qualitative-quantitative face validity, qualitative-quantitative content validity with content validity ratio and index (CVR/CVI), construct validity by exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and convergent validity, internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha/ Omega McDonald's/ floor and ceiling effect) and stability with intra-class correlation (ICC).

After interviews with 14 emergency technicians, the initial scale was designed with 60 items. Of the total items, 17 poor items were dropped during face and qualitative content validity. In the content validity phase, the items with CVR > 0.62, modified Kappa > 0.74 were retained, which eliminated 23 items. EFA was conducted with 20 items and lead to the 5 factors. The floor and ceiling effect for the whole scale was zero. Finally, the reliability of the scale was confirmed (a = 0.83, O = 0.86, ICC = 0.95).

The developed 20-item scale is a valid and reliable scale for the assessment of the MD in EMS providers.

Despite the undoubted role of family firms in the economy, some main factors challenge their attempts for business internationalisation. These drivers are varied from organisational and environmental to individual attributes. This study tries to recognise and explore the impacts of the personality traits of managers, founders, and owners of family firms in their business internationalisation. The study used a questionnaire to collect data from a sample of 204 managers, founders, and owners of small- and medium-sized family firms to consider the relationship between personality traits: conscientiousness, openness, extroversion, neuroticism and agreeableness, and business internationalisation (BI). The hypotheses were analysed through structural equation modelling (SEM) using Lisrel. The results suggest different impacts of personality traits on facilitating the internationalisation process. According to the finding, extroversion and openness have a significant positive and agreeableness and conscientiousness have positive, less significant impacts on the tendency towards business internationalisation. Moreover, neuroticism impacts negatively significantly. Therefore, managers, founders, and owners of small- and medium-sized family firms who are extrovert, open, and non-neuroticism (tranquil) are more encaustic to making strategic decisions for extending their business to international markets.

This paper aims to consider the role and influence of social capital (SC) on knowledge management (KM) and sets out to develop an understanding of the importance of the impact of the cross-cultural environment on this relationship.

According to the notion, in this study, the relationship between two essential aspects in management and business, SC on KM practices, has been analyzed. By applying a descriptive and correlational method, the impact of various dimensions of SC on KM in a cross-cultural setting has been investigated, and required data has been obtained through questionnaires consist of 30 items, which is prepared for a sample of 232 people.

Although the findings are varied, the results indicated that there is an important relationship between SC dimensions and KM in the research environment, which is cross-cultural.

First, as the data derived from different branches of a big company in Iran, its results cannot be easily extended to other contexts. Therefore, future streams of research can expand the scope of this paper into other contexts with different characteristics. Moreover, the sample of this paper is taken from different communities (branches) which increase the variety of personality features in distinct cultures. Thus, further research can stress a particular organization/ branch to avoid the problem of cultural variation and focus on a more homogenous sample. Finally, this study targeted a big organization in the IT sector. However, future studies can investigate another type of firm (e.g. small and medium firms) in different sectors (e.g. manufacturing, food sector, etc.).

In this research, using scientific and practical methods, the impacts have been examined carefully and deliberately to assist the managers of organizations in theoretically and managerially as these outcomes contribute to the development of a new concept called cross-cultural in knowledge management and social capital, and support organizations to cope with the implications of this concept.

There is not much empirical research on cross-cultural settings and its effects on management, finance and business, especially on correlations between KM and SC. This investigation tries to fill this gap and explain the ways, which companies can use SC for enhancing their effectiveness of KM by considering culture diversity impacts.

In this study, electrochemical deposition method which have cheaper equipment than thermal spraying methods and is available for the production of composite coatings were used.

Composite coatings were electrodeposited from a Watts's bath solution in which the suspended Cr₃C₂-NiCr particles were dispersed in the bath solution during deposition. Potentiodynamic polarization and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy techniques have been used to evaluate the corrosion resistance of the composite coating in the 3.5 Wt.% NaCl solution.

It was found that the submicron Cr₃C₂-NiCr particles distributed uniformly in the coating and depend on the current density of deposition, different amount of particles can be incorporated in the coating. The results showed that the corrosion resistance of the Ni/ Cr₃C₂-NiCr composite coatings is more comparable to the pure nickel coating.

Production of Ni-base composite coating from an electrolytic bath containing Cr₃C₂-NiCr particles is possible via electrodeposition.

Despite the undoubted role of knowledge in the small family business (FB) in the restaurant and fast-food industry, there are some main challenges in the knowledge-sharing (KS) orientation for promoting their business. This study tries to recognise and explore the drivers influencing these enterprises' KS processes.

The authors applied combined exploratory and confirmatory analysis in two studies. In the first study, by the Delphi method, the 22 experts consisting of managers, FB owners and academic professors explore and forecast significant items and drivers. The second study is a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for validating the first study's indicators using the survey collected amongst 218 restaurants and fast foods employees.

The findings indicate 23 indicators in three main drivers of individual, organisational and technological, are critical for KS in small FBs in the investigated industry.

This research supports the understanding of knowledge management and the FB and contributes to recognising the influential factors for KS amongst small and medium-sized family businesses in the food-related industry. Also, by identifying and ranking the most significant factors, this research will help entrepreneurs facilitate FB entrepreneurship. Finally, the results provide practical implications for current and future KM and FB decision-makers.

Environmental awareness is increasing among people in developing countries. In this regard, companies should consider ecological goals in addition to financial goals. Since the food industry is recognised as one of the largest emitters of CO₂, profit and ecological objectives are optimised in radio-frequency identification (RFID) based closed-loop supply chain in the food industry in this paper.

Based on the literature, companies with a green entrepreneurial orientation (GEO) can turn ecological problems into opportunities using their proactiveness. In this regard, a new mixed-integer non-linear mathematical model is presented for optimising a new multi-product RFID-based closed-loop supply chain with a GEO in the food industry. The case study in this paper is Ofogh-e Kourosh company which is located in Iran. The GAMS software is used to code this model.

The optimum number of new products and materials flow was found among the closed-loop supply chain entities. Some factors as price, quality and warranty of products were considered, and the number of reopening of facilities if needed was set. The optimum node for RFID installation was found.

The paper presents a multi-objective mathematical model for optimising a multi-product RFID-based closed-loop supply chain with a GEO in the food industry. In addition, this paper gives insights into how can model this type of supply chain considering ecological and financial attributes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a simple HP-cloud method as an accurate meshless method for the geometrically nonlinear analysis of thick orthotropic plates of general shape. This method is used to investigate the effects of thickness, geometry of various shapes, boundary conditions and material properties on the large deformation analysis of Mindlin plates.

Nonlinear analysis of plates based on Mindlin theory is presented. The equations are derived by the Von-Karman assumption and total Lagrangian formulations. Newton-Raphson method is applied to achieve linear equations from nonlinear equations. Simple HP-cloud method is used for the construction of the shape functions based on Kronecker-δ properties, so the essential boundary conditions can be enforced directly. Shepard function is utilized for a partition of unity and complete polynomial is used as an enrichment function.

The suitability and efficiency of the simple HP-cloud method for the geometrically nonlinear analysis of thin and moderately thick plates is studied for the first time. Large displacement analysis of various shapes of plates, rectangular, skew, trapezoidal, circular, hexagonal and triangular with different boundary conditions subjected to distributed loading are considered.

This paper shows that the simple HP-cloud method is well suited for the large deformation analysis of Mindlin plates with various geometries, because it uses a set of a few arbitrary nodes placed in a plate of general shape. Moreover the convergence rate of the proposed method is high and the cost of solving equations is low.