The use of the AHP method for team leader selection in internal company projects

This study proposes a comprehensive decision support model that integrates the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with goal programming from multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques in order to identify team leaders who will be assigned to internal projects and ensure appropriate leader-project matching. The primary objective of the research is to establish an objective basis for the leader appointment process by offering a systematic and measurable method that can simultaneously evaluate the individual competencies of leader candidates and the specific requirements of projects. Leadership criteria and project requirements, which are often addressed separately in the literature, have been integrated and analysed within a multidimensional structure in this study. In the first stage of the model, leadership candidates were evaluated using the AHP method based on criteria such as leadership characteristics, personal characteristics, teamwork experience, emergency management, and communication skills; the weighted scores obtained were normalised to determine the competence levels of the leaders. In the second stage, leader-project suitability scores were calculated by considering the strategic priorities and criteria-based needs levels of the projects, and these data were defined as inputs to the target programming model. The model was solved on the Google Colab platform using the Python programming language and the PuLP optimisation library; a multi-objective optimisation structure was established with constraints such as assigning each leader to only one project, balancing the workload distribution, and penalising matches that did not meet the minimum competence requirements. As a result of the model's solution, 'Highly Competent' leaders were assigned to projects with a high strategic priority level, "Competent" leaders were directed to medium-level projects, and 'Less Competent' leaders were assigned only to the most suitable projects, thereby ensuring efficiency in resource utilisation. The results obtained not only increased the success rates of individual projects but also made significant contributions to the strategic planning of leadership capacity at the organisational level, the efficient management of human resources, and the transparency of decision-making processes. In this regard, the study constitutes an original contribution to both corporate applications and academic literature.