МЕТОД ПРИНЯТИЯ УПРАВЛЕНЧЕСКИХ РЕШЕНИЙ В ПРОЕКТНЫХ КОМАНДАХ С УЧЁТОМ КОНФЛИКТОГЕННЫХ ФАКТОРОВ

Abstract:
The cross-functional composition of a project team and short approval deadlines increase the likelihood that participants will diverge in the criteria they use to assess managerial alternatives, while conflict in such an environment arises as a consequence of a decision already taken and is not assessed before the choice is made. The purpose of the article is to develop a method of managerial decision-making in project teams that incorporates the assessment of conflict-generating factors directly into the selection procedure. The hypothesis of the study is that a preliminary assessment of conflict-generating factors during the selection of an alternative reduces the likelihood of destructive conflicts at the planning and execution stages of a project. The study was carried out through a comparative analysis of 11 managerial decision-making methods drawn from 17 sources, a synthesis of the selected instruments and a formalisation of the selection procedure as a step-by-step algorithm. The comparative analysis shows that none of the methods considered provides for a preventive assessment of the conflict-generating potential of alternatives. Some instruments record conflict as a feature of an existing situation, while analytical methods optimise the choice against efficiency criteria and disregard the consequences for the team. The article presents a method of managerial decision-making in project teams based on the integration of criteria for assessing conflict-emergence factors into the procedure of selecting managerial alternatives, which reduces the likelihood of destructive conflicts at the planning and execution stages of a project. The method combines five groups of conflict-generating factors with an algorithm of seven steps and draws on T. L. Saaty’s pairwise comparison scale, group consensus procedures and the experimentally confirmed reduction of escalation of commitment from 39 to 20 per cent under cognitive priming. The scientific novelty of the result consists in converting conflict generation from a feature of an existing situation into a measurable parameter of every alternative. The practical significance is determined by the opportunity to reduce operational losses through the prevention of destructive conflicts. The prospects of the work are the empirical verification of the method on a sample of projects and the calibration of weights based on monitoring statistics.