منا حبيب پور

Today, enhancing productivity and improving performance have become crucial and essential issues for managers of various organizations. To maintain a competitive edge and secure their position in the market, organizations must regularly assess their performance. In the real world, many organizations and decision-making units operate within a hierarchical structure, with an internal network of activities and decisions. The performance at each level of this structure can significantly impact the overall performance of the unit. Consequently, performance eva‎luation in such organizations is particularly important due to the complexity and breadth of their processes and organizational levels. Moreover, most organizations are composed of multiple groups and departments. In certain cases, it is necessary to eva‎luate a group of decision-making units rather than individual units to better understand the influence of environmental conditions and management strategies on performance. Therefore, the aim of this thesis, is to eva‎luate the performance of decision-making units from two distinct perspectives. The first perspective extends beyond individual units to eva‎luate the performance and productivity changes within groups of decision-making units. In this regard, a suitable distance function is introduced to measure the efficiency of a group, and based on this, the Malmquist productivity index is developed to assess the productivity changes of the group. Subsequently, the factors affecting productivity growth within groups are analyzed, focusing on both intra-group and inter-group dynamics. In the second part, from a detailed perspective, this thesis examines the performance of units by considering the impact of subunit performance and intermediary activities. A new model for eva‎luating the performance of bi-level units is proposed in this context. Bi-level units are a specific type of hierarchical structure with two levels, where the leader unit is at the upper level, and followers operate at the lower level. Based on the proposed model, a bi-level Malmquist index is developed to measure productivity changes in bi-level units. Furthermore, to demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed indices, real-world case studies within the banking sector are conducted.

تحليل پوششي داده ها , كارايي , شاخص بهره وري مالمكوئيست , واحدهاي دوسطحي , گروه ها

Data envelopment analysis , Efficiency , Malmquist productivity index , Bi-level units , Groups

Mona Habibpoor

Mohammadreza Alirezaee