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) how do these effects vary over the temporary life of this organizational form? To examine these questions, we begin by describing the JOC organizational form to identify its distinctive features. Next, we develop a set of competing hypotheses with which to examine the theorized conflicting influences of affiliation and situation on the response decision-making process and its effectiveness. We conclude with a discussion of the results of our hypotheses testing and the implications, limitations, and contributions of our findings for future research and practice. A major contribution is the finding that organizational affiliation drives responses, consistent with uncertainty avoidance, but that these effects decrease over time. BACKGROUND Prior work on this topic and context has generally been limited to public sector applications and focused on government policy development, military and law enforcement training, or epidemiological issues (Green and Kolesar, 2004). Prior research has included the development, testing, and refinement of vaccination strategies (Rvachev and Longini, 1985), response strategies to virus outbreaks (Craft et al., 2005; Kaplan et al., 2002, 2003; Kaplan and Wein, 2004), and decision-making processes during crisis response (Hale et al., 2006). There is also a substantial body of competing work developed subsequently or in parallel to the program of research on which this study is based (Carley et al., 2003; Carley et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2006; Epstein et al., 2004; Eubank, 2002; Eubank et al., 2004; Harrison et al., 2007). Extant research has also examined various issues of interorganizational coordination and trust (Hardy and Phillips, 1998; Kumar and Niti, 1998; Kumar and van Dissel, 1996; Osborn and Hagedoorn, 1997; Poppo et al., 2008; Westley and Vrendenburg, 1997), and response effectiveness (Lin and Carley, 1993, 1997). One common thread in this body of work is that interorganizational decision-making coordination is a multifaceted issue involving different schools of thought and methodological approaches (Hale et al., 2006; Harrison et al., 2007; Osborn and Hagedoorn, 1997; Poppo et al., 2008). Joint Operations Centers (JOC) are a preferred organizational form for responding to dynamic, high-magnitude, time-critical situations of high uncertainty, which require personnel with varied knowledge backgrounds, from multiple organizations, to be rapidly combined (USDHS, 2004). …