Summary
Inter-organizational teams are an increasingly common organizational form for responding to crisis situations. The effectiveness of these forms is dependent on the composition and experience of the team, their interpretation of the situation at hand, and their ability to formulate a timely response. However, competing demands from the team member's organizational affiliation and the specific needs of the crisis both influence response decision-making priorities and choices. Despite the timely importance of effective strategic decision making for crisis response, this area of research remains underexplored in the management literature. To examine how some of the extant literature on strategic decision making may improve crisis response effectiveness, this study examines the behavior of government officials responding to a simulated terrorism event. Consistent with an uncertainty avoidance hypothesis, our results suggest that organizational affiliation drives responses, but that these effects decrease over time. We discuss implications, limitations, and contributions of our findings for future research on and the practice of strategic decision making in these contexts.
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Extract
Affiliation or Situation: What Drives Strategic Decision-Making in Crisis Response?*
Temporary inter-organizational teams, such as a "Joint Operations Center" (JOC), are a common organizational form for military and government response to rare high magnitude events such as natural disasters or terrorism. Changes in the global security environment in the late 20th and early 21st century have increased both the frequency of use of these organizational forms and the importance of their effectiveness, as the costs of failure may be extensive and hold significant implications (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2004; USDHS, 2004). Several features of these organizational forms - individuals from different organizations coming together at short notice to devise a common response to situations fraught with uncertainty also characterize inter-organizational collaborations in the private sector (e.g., industry task force to respond to a common crisis). Therefore, as JOC-types of organizational forms increase in importance and prevalence, so does the need to better understand how they operate and what contributes to their effectiveness (Green and Kolesar, 2004; USDHS, 2004). However, beyond the project management literature, management research on these types of organizational forms has been limited, and their application to strategic decision making in crisis response contexts is under-examined.
The purpose of this study is to examine two important, yet underexplored, questions about the strategic decision-making processes in JOCs: (1) to what extent are team member preferences driven by different affiliations - goals, priorities, and routines of their parent organizations rather than by the needs of the situation, and (2...See the full content of this document
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