Explanation and Comparison of the characteristics of complex problems from the viewpoints of managers and experts

For dealing with the complex problems and providing the appropriate solutions for them, first we must identify the various types of such problems. The aim of this study is to find the characteristics of organizational complex problems from the managers' viewpoints and comparing them with the experts' viewpoints on these kinds of problems. For this purpose, we first identified the characteristics of complex problems from expert's viewpoints in the related literature. Then, we conducted semi-structured interviews with fourteen managers in some public organizations. In these interviews, we asked the managers to express their own definitions of complex problems or refer to the various examples of them in their own organizations.
In this paper, first, a qualitative content analysis of interview transcripts has been utilized in order to extract the characteristics of the complex problems from the viewpoints of managers. At this stage, we could identify eight main characteristics of complex problems and compared them with the characteristics identified from the viewpoint of experts correspondingly. Then, at the next stage, we used a deconstruction method to better understand why managers had pointed to these main characteristics. The results of this section implied the confirmation of these characteristics in a different way.