Identify and Prioritize the Factors of Inefficient Decisions by Public Sector Managers (Case Study: Government Organizations of Golestan province)

Considering the wide consequences of ineffective decisions made by public sector managers that lead to waste of resources, waste of opportunities and reduced public trust in the government, the present study aims to identify the causes of this phenomenon and determine the importance of each of these factors. In the qualitative part, through interviews with 20 government managers of Golestan province, using targeted sampling at the basic, intermediate and higher levels, key factors were identified and using the content analysis method and Maxqda software, the data set was organized in 27 criteria and in 3 categories. In order to ensure the accuracy of the coding, the result of the content analysis was sent to some participants and corrective comments were applied. In the quantitative phase, in order to rank the factors, hierarchical analysis method and pairwise comparison questionnaire with the participation of 45 people were used. The data obtained from the questionnaires were analyzed by Expert choice software. Findings indicate that factors related to the decision-making process (0.473), organizational factors (0.355) and factors related to the decision-makers (0.173), respectively, play the most important role in making ineffective decisions from the perspective of participants. Based on the research findings, it can be said that due to the fact that changing the personal characteristics of managers is very difficult and less important among the factors, government organizations can focus on improving the decision-making process and controlling organizational factors influencing decisions, significantly improve the quality of public sector decisions.