Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve U., United States
Since the projects operate in a dynamic environment, the interest in understanding project uncertainty and complexity has a long history in organizational behavior studies. However, even though little research has investigated behavioral decision-making in projects, the reflection of interactions of behavioral decision-making happening across multi-paradigms of projects is further ignored. Through the reflective study reported here, we elaborate on the theory concerning behavioral decision-making in multi-paradigms of project complexity. Using the onto-epistemological view, we identify the phenomenological interactions occurring among multi-paradigms in a project and define the mechanism of the phenomenological meta-cognitive regulation through which these interactions occur by forming the meta-cognitive strategies of mental contrasting used in those. My findings indicate that, through the acquisition of meta-cognitive knowledge and meta-cognitive awareness, developing the meta-cognitive strategy of mental contrasting is used to regulate each interaction between different phenomena like the plan, risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty. As a result, using these meta-cognitive strategies of mental contrasting, project managers and stakeholders can navigate through the complexity of projects by making behavioral decision-making-based interactions in projects.