**1. Introduction**

In the new journey of the construction industry's development, construction program management, which manages construction projects in groups has gradually become a trend in China [1]. Construction program is more presented in the form of large-scale, complex and groups of "giant projects", such as the West-East Gas Transmission Project, the Yangtze River Three Gorges Project, the Beijing Olympic venues construction project, the South China Sea Petrochemical Project, etc. Construction program management is conducive to enhancing the core competitiveness of enterprises, expanding the market of construction enterprises and realizing enterprises' organization strategy [2]. However, the complexity and uncertainty of different construction projects, especially large-scale projects, has brought great challenges to construction program management, which requires the construction program managers being able to handle rapidly changing programs. As the core personnel in the management process, the construction program manager has a huge impact on the success of the project [3]. Therefore, selecting a competent construction program manager is one of the key factors of the construction program.

However, the current process of selecting and hiring project managers usually uses simple factors in the decision-making process. Such process has significant cognitive limitations while psychological factors and preferences of the decision makers will affect

**Citation:** Yan, H.; Yang, Y.; Lei, X.; Ye, Q.; Huang, W.; Gao, C. Regret Theory and Fuzzy-DEMATEL-Based Model for Construction Program Manager Selection in China. *Buildings* **2023**, *13*, 838. https://doi.org/10.3390/ buildings13040838

Academic Editor: Maxim A. Dulebenets

Received: 7 February 2023 Revised: 19 March 2023 Accepted: 20 March 2023 Published: 23 March 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

the decision results, thus potentially causing regrets. In such cases, the decision made based on expectation theory is often unable to explain the actual decision-making behavior, and most of the decision makers evaluate alternative construction project managers not in precise numbers, but in fuzzy language, and there are defects such as information loss and poor accuracy of results in the quantification process.

Thus, based on the limitations of currently used construction project manager selection process, this paper combined regret theory, Fuzzy-DEMATEL method, disparity minimization, and multi-attribute group decision making method to quantify, rank, and selects the optimal construction program manager. The proposed model can further improve the scientific nature of the selection of construction program managers for construction enterprises, thus, to improve the overall management effectiveness and efficiency of the programs.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: (1) a literature review regarding related topics is provided; (2) the data collection process of this study is explained; (3) the competency model of construction program manager is explained; (4) the construction program manager selection model's development process is provided; (5) a case study is provided to prove the feasibility of the proposed model, and (6) the results of the case study as well as main conclusions and future works are presented.

#### **2. Literature Review**

The literature review of this paper mainly covered literatures related to methods for construction program (project) manager selection, construction project manager's evaluation indices, language assessment methods, and regret theory.

#### *2.1. Construction Program (Project) Manager Selection*

After a comprehensive literature review, only a few studies were found that focused on the selection of construction program managers while most of the documents were aimed at the selection of single project managers. The traditional methods for selecting construction managers in China are mainly achieved through recruitment and open competition [4]. Although organized recruitment method is easy to apply, it is not conducive to innovation and may lead to lack of vitality [5]. Open competition, on the other hand not only selects the best option, but also enhances the competition awareness and the sense of responsibility of the program manager. For open competition, most scholars mainly study the competency of construction project managers [6–8]. In the selection of construction project managers, binary semantic analysis [9], vector angle cosine method [10], analytic hierarchy process [11], support vector basis method [12] are used for selection.

Related research overseas is more in-depth than that in China. Overseas, the selection often requires the application of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods for robust recruitment [13]. Most foreign scholars also studied the competency of construction managers [14,15], using comprehensive mathematics method [16], analytic hierarchy process [17], Delphi and fuzzy language evaluation method, target programming and topsis [18,19], and other methods. Their main objective was to establish the selection model index system, ranking the alternative construction managers, then selecting the optimal construction managers.

#### *2.2. Construction Project Manager'S Evaluation Indices*

For construction project manager's evaluation indices, Skulmoski and Hartman considered that excellent personality charm is one of the strengths of construction project managers to ensure the trust and support of project team members and smooth cooperation with other stakeholders [20]; Krchová's study showed that as the leader of a construction project, the manager must have a convincing personality charm, which plays an important role in mobilizing the team's motivation, uniting the team's fighting force, and successfully implementing the project. Therefore, developing and demonstrating personal charm has become an important challenge for project team managers. Management skills are considered to be a direct reflection of the high level of working ability of project team managers

and one of the key hard skills they must master [21]. Considering the characteristics of construction progam managers in practice, most of the time is spent on communication and emotional connection between the program's stakeholders. Therefore, effective communication can help with reducing conflicts between the construction program organization and stakeholders and support the manager to make the right decisions [22]. As a construction program manager, having excellent professional skills is necessary to ensure the program's success [21]. The managers should have the ability to control the risks and discover potential risks of the construction program, to propose effective solutions in a timely manner, and to adopt effective ways to achieve the management goal of the construction program [23]. Furthermore, strategic vision and stress resistance ability are also emphasized as key characteristics of the managers considering the uncertainty and high stress environment of construction program management [22,24,25].

#### *2.3. Language Assessment Methods*

Language assessment scale is a prerequisite for group decision making that generally required to select appropriate assessment scale. Levrat and Bordogna et al. [26] used linguistic terms such as "very high", "high", "general", "low", and "very low" to evaluate the scheme. Herrera and Martinez (2000) transformed the evaluation terms into binary groups formed by the values in [−0.5, 0.5]. Dai et al. [27] conducted comparative analysis on the commonly used uniform scale and non-uniform scale. The research shows that the non-uniform language scale is more consistent with people's expression habits as well as the conclusions.

### *2.4. Regret Theory*

For regret theory, it was firstly applied to the choice between two schemes, and Quiggin (1994) extended it to the field of multiple schemes. Bleiehrodt et al. [28] constructed regret-happy function based on exact number and provided its calculation method. On this basis, Zhang, Fan, and Chen [29] used interval number to express the uncertainty of information, while Zhang, Zhu, and Liu [30] used fuzzy number concept to describe it. However, in practice, decision makers tend to use language to evaluate a scheme. Therefore, Zhang and Wang [31] designed a regret-happy function based on language information which shows advantages in language identification.

#### **3. Construction Program Manager Selection Evaluation Index System Based on Grounded Theory**

Grounded Theory is a bottom-up qualitative research method based on research questions from field observations by collecting and analyzing data to refine concepts and categories, thus rising to the theoretical level [32]. Grounded theory is able to resolve the differences between traditional quantitative research and qualitative research. At present, academic research on the selection and evaluation index of construction program manager is still in its infancy. Therefore, this paper chooses grounded theory method to construct the selection and evaluation index system of construction program manager selection.

#### *3.1. Data Collection*

Considering the number of interviewees available and the purpose of this research, purposive sample is used to select proper interviewees in the data collection process. Purposive sampling, as known as judgment sampling, is typically used to identify and select the information-rich cases for the most proper utilization of available resources [33]. So, managers who have rich experience in construction project/program management and have high credibility in constructing the selection evaluation index system for construction program managers are selected. Based on the literature analysis, this paper prepared a preliminary interview outline. To ensure that the interviewees could accurately understand the purpose of the interview and that the recovered interview data could fully support the study, experts were invited to make preliminary modifications to the interview outline.

On this basis, the first two interviewees were interviewed using the preliminary revised interview outline, and the outline was revised again based on the suggestions of the interviewees to obtain a final interview outline that met the requirements of the study. The interviews were conducted by telephone from January 2021 to March 2021 with 15 interviewees and nearly 20,000 pieces of information were collected, as shown in Figure 1.

**Figure 1.** Basic information of interviewees.

Most of the interviewees were males aged between 30 and 50 with considerable experiences. In terms of academic qualifications, the majority of the interviewees had master's degrees or PhDs, reflecting that the interviewees had high level education and social perspective, and could understand the interview questions to give credible responses. In terms of gender, males were significantly more numerous than females in this study's sample. This is mainly caused by the fact that, on the whole, males are more frequently hired in construction project manager positions due to the working condition and intensities. For the employers of the interviewees, the number of state-owned enterprises and private enterprises was equal, reflecting that the work environment was selected in a more balanced manner in this study.
