Empathy, tolerance for uncertainty and emotional intelligence among the agro-industrial complex managers to predict the decision-making efficiency in the antagonistic game

Abstract Management of such a complex system as agriculture requires special attention to making managerial decisions. The most common situation in agriculture is decision-making in the risk environment. One of the groups of factors that affect the process of managerial decision-making are psychological factors, including what a particular person contributes to the process of developing and making the management decision, depending on personal qualities, abilities, experience, motivation, culture, competence. This paper presents the research of the empathy and emotional intelligence role for the decision-making process in the situation of uncertainty, using both known and new developed by us methods of the antagonistic game, in which the subjects have opposite interests. Research has shown that in a high-risk competitive situation, people tend to make their decisions not in the attempt to understand other people’s emotions, but in the attempt to influence the opponent’s emotional state. In a low-risk situation, managers prefer to focus on their own judgment and pay less attention to their opponent. This fact can also be interpreted as a tendency to allocate attention to more important tasks, which helps managers cope with difficulties, including those typical for the agricultural sphere.