Collaborative Crisis Management: A Coordination Science Framework to Enhance Stakeholder Responses to Emergencies

Abstract

Crises caused by a broad spectrum of emergency triggers are creating unprecedented challenges for local and global institutions and business entities. The capacity of a system to respond and recover from a crisis is strongly influenced by the ability to manage coordination among “coalitions” of involved agents and to support dialogue and collaborative leadership. However, coordination science and engineering approaches have not been extensively investigated in crisis management studies and practitioner applications. This article is positioned in such a research gap and it adopts a cross-disciplinary view to design a novel crisis management paradigm, which defines coordination as a keystone of effective and efficient responses. In this article, we present a coordination core, with three key dependencies (i.e., fit, flow, and share) concerned with resource and activity management during a crisis, and four pillars of crisis prevention, crisis awareness, crisis response, and crisis recovery, with 64 associated attributes, including constructs, processes, tools, and analytics. We present two illustrative scenarios and we discuss that findings are made along a societal and organizational crisis management viewpoint. The article further develops crisis management theory by bringing a coordination engineering perspective, and it offers business leaders and policymakers a practical model for embedding crisis management capabilities in their organizations.