Information sharing and decision-making in multidisciplinary crisis management teams

Multidisciplinary crisis management teams consist of highly experienced professionals who combine their discipline-specific expertise in order to respond to critical situations characterized by high levels of uncertainty, complexity, and dynamism. Although the existing literatures on team information processing and decision-making are mature, research specifically investigating multidisciplinary teams facing crisis situations is limited; however, given increasingly turbulent external environments that produce complex crisis situations, increasing numbers of organizations are likely to call upon multidisciplinary teams to address such events. In this paper, we investigate information processing and decision-making behaviors in an exploratory study of 12 organizational multidisciplinary crisis management teams. We identify three types of information sharing and track the emergence of distinct communicative phases as well as differences between high- and low-performing teams in the occurrence of sequences of information sharing behaviors. We close by discussing implications for research in this area and for managers of crisis management teams.