In general, the characteristics of a project leader may influence the possible success of a project. Therefore, project leader selection is one of the most important tasks for project management. In the matrix
of an organization, a project leader is difficult to select from within a single department of an organization. A good project leader must try to cooperate easily with each member in a project team. In this study, the general ability, professional ability and the social network strength of each employee will be examined for the purpose of selecting a project leader. Accordingly, interval linguistic TOPSIS is combined
with a maximizing deviation method to evaluate the general ability of each employee. Knowledge mapping is used to evaluate the professional ability of
each employee. The comprehensive ability of each employee is defined by combining each one’s general and professional abilities. Based on the concept of social networking, the cooperation capacity of each employee is defined to indicate the strength of the degree of cooperation with other members in the enterprise. Therefore, a project leader can be selected by considering the employees’ comprehensive ability and their cooperation capacity simultaneously. Next, a numerical example is created to illustrate the process of the proposed method. Finally, some conclusions are discussed at the end of this study.