Suchergebnisse

AbstractSince the second half of the latest century the disaster landscape has experienced important changes. Disasters are not only increasing in quantity, they are also qualitatively different and seem to distress humanity to a considerably higher degree than in the past. This evolution does not only deeply affect modern societies; it might also have a disruptive impact on the intervening units of emergency management organizations. Recent disaster research mainly focuses on mitigation efforts, risk reduction and resilient societies. Though, despite good mitigation efforts and up-to-date preparation initiatives, still millions of people are affected and thousands killed annually by some kind of disaster. As a consequence, disaster response remains a vital aspect of disaster management and will even become more important in the future taking into consideration the changing disaster landscape. On that account, our study aims to remodel the response phase of the disaster management life cycle, focusing on a new and fresh approach. We consider the response phase as an unfolding global process and its ensuing sub-processes rather than just an enumeration of potential activities.

Findings of recent disaster research make mention of a changing disaster landscape. According to the disaster literature, there has been a general increase of the quantity of disasters per time frame during the last decades. On the other hand, several academics refer to a more important qualitative shift in the disaster landscape. Although this qualitative shift is very credible, there exists no academic study approving this evolution. If suchlike evolution is concrete, we will have to strengthen our emergency management in a substantial way in order to be better prepared for managing future disasters. After discussing the changing nature of disasters, we concentrate on a study of randomly selected disasters, using the Disaster and Complexity Diagram, a tool permitting to study qualitative trends in disaster evolution.

We assess the relative value of participative and directive leadership for improving the accuracy and speed of decision-making in crisis management teams, contingent on whether teams face an emergency that is familiar or unfamiliar to them. Testing our theory, using randomized experiments, with 72 teams tasked with managing simulated crises, we found that participative leadership improves decision accuracy in unfamiliar emergencies, whereas directive leadership improves accuracy in familiar crises; directive leadership produces speedier decisions than participative leadership when the team is familiar with the crisis. We discuss implications of our findings for leaders and crisis management experts.