Support managers' selection using an extension of fuzzy TOPSIS

Considering the contemporary business settings, managers' role is more than essential to the viability and further development of an organization. Managers should possess such skills in order to effectively cope with the competition. In this respect, selecting managers based on their skills can lead to a competitive advantage towards the achievement of organizational goals. Highlighting the complexity of the selection process, this study proposes a multicriteria approach based on fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for group decision making. Three new concepts are introduced, namely the relative importance of the decision makers per criterion, the similarity-proximity degree among the decision makers and the veto thresholds, in an effort to better describe the problem and support the process. An empirical application validates the proposed approach for the selection of a middle level manager in a large IT Greek firm. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.