THE INTERACTIVE GOAL PROGRAMMING ALGORITHM FOR SMALL GROUP DECISION MAKING WITH MULTIPLE GOALS

Decision making in groups is pervasive in the business world today. Frequently small groups are asked to address relatively important organizational issues and to recommend acceptable solutions to complex problems. At the same time goal programming has been proven to be an outstanding technique for aiding a single decision maker to find satisficing solutions to problems with incommensurable, possibly conflicting, goals. The adaptation of goal programming to the group problem would appear to be a valuable contribution to multiple criteria decision making. This research project resulted in a goal programming based algorithm and procedure for use with group applications. Taking advantage of a small, decision making group\u27s ability to share information, and recognizing that each group member has an interest in observing the effect on the model of his or her preferred goal structure, the process allows the group to iteratively converge on a consensus, if one is possible. Each group member is provided with his or her own model solution and with the solution of a combined group model at each cycle in the decision making activity. Group members are allowed to determine individually the preemptive goal rankings and right hand side values for predesignated group goals. Additional goals required by the analyst to ensure model integrity or those established by a higher authority may be merged with group goals at any position in the priority structure. The analyst can access the group\u27s voting trends through a module in the computer code. The algorithm and prescribed group process were tested with three academic planning applications using groups with a serious interest in the problems addressed. The process is more effective with groups sharing goals versus groups exhibiting strong intramember conflict. However, the process allows the group facilitator to observe clearly where conflict lies, providing an opportunity to reduce or resolve it altogether