Principles of psychology as a basis for constructing and using business games in business education

To train managers, and even more often - to improve their skills are now actively used a variety of training systems and computer-software tools. First of all, these are business games that use the principles of psychology and imitate the activities of the leadership of a certain company, where students acquire the skills of independently transferring the obtained theoretical knowledge to the field of making specific managerial decisions. Certainly, the quality of a business game is directly determined by how the principles of psychology as a science are realized in it, how adequately and truthfully this model reproduces the economic situation. Simulation modeling and basic principles of psychology are the theoretical basis for the construction and application of such business games.

To prepare and justify management decisions, there is a sufficient number of economic and mathematical models that use the principles of psychology, but it is impossible to cover all the problems of practical interest. Often, models are extremely complex, and there are no methods for finding solutions, even for such advanced tasks as solved by computers, such as inventory management, to find numerical solutions not only have to be limited to small dimensions, but also introduce significant simplifications. Therefore, in practice, widely used methods are simulation techniques that use as a theoretical basis the fundamental principles of psychology, when an experimental model of a managed system is first developed, and then only a comparative evaluation of the scenarios of the system is performed by "playing" typical and atypical situations on the model in question.

Factors of uncertainty between parts of the system are represented in the form of formulas or logical-mathematical relations. Simulating the system is precisely that stage in the implementation of the business game, and which the principles of psychology play a leading role. It begins with the establishment of some initial state of the situation, which, as a result of the decisions made, and also under the influence of uncontrolled events passes into other states.

The simulation experiment is connected with a large number of computations, therefore it requires modern computers and often computer networks for its implementation. The main thing is that this model allows us to examine the essence of the process under investigation, the tendencies of its behavior. It usually pursues one of the following objectives: the study of the existing production system; Analysis of the hypothetical model; Designing a more perfect system. For the trainee, the most important thing is to intelligently and adequately interpret the results of the simulation, and this skill is achieved precisely by how professionally the psychological and pedagogical criteria are taken into account in the development of the game.

As the experience of using training systems shows, it is most effective to use business games with several teams of players, each of which represents "its firm" and decides on prices, production volumes, advertising, etc. Software and computer facilities perform two functions: keep a record of all Actions of participants in the game and simultaneously evaluate the economic consequences of the management decisions of playing competing firms.

The tasks contained in business games and requiring their solution must be relevant, practically meaningful, rather complicated, but accessible for solution; Be searchable, encourage students not only to systematically use the available knowledge, but also to search for new original solutions. Business games should provide multiple execution of changing situations, for example, modeling of enterprise management processes. Experience has shown that in the learning process, business games should not be time-consuming to enter information, but the forms of its presentation should be close to the real ones.