Information sharing and decision‐making in multidisciplinary crisis management teams

• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2301
• Published date: 01 July 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Information sharing and decision‐making in multidisciplinary

crisis management teams

Sjir Uitdewilligen

1

|Mary J. Waller

2

1

Department of Work and Social Psychology,

Maastricht University, Maastricht,

Netherlands

2

M.J. Neeley School of Business, Texas

Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Sjir Uitdewilligen, Department of Work and

Social Psychology, Maastricht University,

Maastricht, Netherlands.

Email: sjir.uitdewilligen@maastrichtuniveristy.

nl

Summary

Multidisciplinary crisis management teams consist of highly experienced professionals

who combine their discipline‐specific expertise in order to respond to critical situa-

tions 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 situa-

tions 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.

KEYWORDS

crisis management team, multidisciplinary teams, team communication, team decision‐making,

team information processing

1|INTRODUCTION

When an unexpected emergency event interrupts normal operations

and threatens harm to an organization, individuals representing vari-

ous areas of expertise are often formed into crisis teams. These multi-

disciplinary teams must rapidly share information and make numerous

decisions in order to address the situation (Bigley & Roberts, 2001;

Smart & Vertinsky, 1977; Smith & Dowell, 2000). For example, multi-

disciplinary emergency management “command‐and‐control”team

members must quickly share unique information in order to

coconstruct a collective understanding of the situation they face and

decide on appropriate responses (Van der Haar, Segers, Jehn, & Van

den Bossche, 2015). Likewise, emergency medical teams must assem-

ble and rapidly share information about the patient's condition in

order to effectively manage a medical emergency situation (Faraj &

Xiao, 2006; Su et al., 2015; Tschan et al., 2006). And organizational

crisis management teams must quickly share information and make

sense of unexpected critical events in order to limit the impact on their

organizations (King, 2002; Lee, Woeste, & Heath, 2007; Nosek &

McNeese, 1997).

For teams operating in complex and dynamic environments char-

acterized by ill‐structured problems, making sense of the flow of infor-

mation constitutes an essential aspect of their task (Weick, Sutcliffe, &

Obstfeld, 2005). In order for team members to align their actions with

one another and to function as an integrated entity, team members

must share crucial aspects of their understanding of the situation

(Salas, Prince, Baker, & Shrestha, 1995; Rico, Sànchez‐Manzanares,

Gil, & Gibson, 2008) and collectively decide what actions to take

(Pearson & Clair, 1998). Moreover, while engaging in active task exe-

cution, team members must share information in order to continually

“update”their collective understanding of the dynamic task situation

as it unfolds over time (Christianson, 2009). Given that multidisciplin-

ary team members' perceptions of situations may vary significantly

depending on their discipline‐specific orientations (Waller, Huber, &

Received: 14 February 2017 Revised: 3 May 2018 Accepted: 4 May 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2301

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:731–748. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 731

Glick, 1995), and given that the increasingly complex nature of con-

temporary crises requires the attention of multidisciplinary teams

(James & Wooten, 2010), understanding more about how multidisci-

plinary teams process information, cocreate collective understanding,

and make decisions takes on added import.

Although the importance of team information processing

during complex and dynamic events has been widely acknowledged

(Gutwin & Greenberg, 2004; Rico et al., 2008; Roth, Multer, & Raslear,

2006; Waller, Gupta, & Giambatista, 2004), research has focused

mostly on constructs related to communication or information sharing

as emergent states or outcomes of team processes; for example,

literature on team situation awareness has suggested that actual

situation knowledge interacts with subjective confidence in predicting

team functioning in dynamic environments (Hamilton, Mancuso,

Mohammed, Tesler, & McNeese, 2017). Little is known about how

multidisciplinary teams process information in order to create a

shared understanding of a dynamic situation and make decisions in

response to it.

To provide more insight regarding how such teams can improve

their performance, we must go beyond investigating communication

in terms of global or aggregated measures and focus intently on the

actual behavioral sequences and overarching temporal phases of com-

munication team members engage in to understand and address crises

(Weingart, 1997; see also Humphrey & Aime, 2014). An in‐depth

investigation of process data and communication behaviors makes it

uniquely possible to study information sharing behaviors over time

as they occur within their temporal context (Ballard, Tschan, & Waller,

2008). Therefore, in this paper, we examine the structure, anteced-

ents, and consequences of information sharing behaviors in the

ongoing verbal exchange among the members of 12 multidisciplinary

crisis teams. We identify distinct communication phases—periods of

time characterized by a particular communicative focus or theme—

and information sharing sequences—clusters of information sharing

communication behaviors occurring among team members—that

distinguish low‐and high‐performing teams. Our general research

question is “How do high‐performing multidisciplinary crisis teams

share and process information and make decisions over time during

complex crises?”

We believe this study advances knowledge about team dynamics

in three important ways. First, by studying the specific communication

phases and behavioral sequences teams engage in while making sense

of the unfolding flow of information, we gain detailed insight into a

collective information processing function that is central to a team's

alignment with its external environment, and hence to the perfor-

mance of the team and, ultimately, its effectiveness for the organiza-

tion or community it serves (Maynard, Kennedy, & Sommer, 2015;

Pérez‐Nordtvedt, Payne, Short, & Kedia, 2008). Second, we adopt a

temporal approach by investigating two temporal aspects of team

action that have been found to be important for understanding team

functioning: the occurrence of time‐based phases in the team commu-

nication process (Gersick, 1988; Poole, 1983) and the effects of the

timing of specific team communication types within the team commu-

nication process (Tschan et al., 2006; Waller, 1999). This temporal

focus is congruent with a number of calls that have been made for

the inclusion of dynamism in theories and studies of group and team

processes (Waller, Okhuysen, & Saghafian, 2016) and, more specifically,

in the temporal aspects of team communication behaviors (e.g.,

Ancona, Okhuysen, & Perlow, 2001; Arrow, Poole, Henry, Wheelan, &

Moreland, 2004). Third, building on literature concerning the role of

artifacts in the use of information in the cocreation of shared under-

standing (Heath & Luff, 1992; Hutchins, 1995), we identify how the

use of whiteboard structuring can function as an important antecedent

of information‐sharing sequences linked to team performance.

In the following sections, we review the pertinent literature on

team information processing and identify three specific levels of infor-

mation sharing. We then describe a field study of 12 multidisciplinary

crisis management teams, during which we collected data from teams

composed of highly skilled organizational participants training in their

discipline‐specific roles as they worked together through realistic sim-

ulated crisis events at Europe's largest sea port: the Port of Rotterdam.

The port covers a geographically large area of land and water and

represents a complex network of port, commercial, and government

entities coordinating not only to keep commerce flowing but also to

ensure safety and protect the fragile surrounding environment and

population. Multidisciplinary crisis teams at the port are charged with

the responsibility of quickly assembling, assessing critical situations,

and carrying out a coordinated response to combat crises ranging from

petrochemical spills to deliberate attacks. In our analyses, we apply an

exploratory approach to the data we collected from these crisis man-

agement teams for assessing the phase structure in the team commu-

nication process and in identifying antecedents and consequences of

specific types of information sharing. Finally, we provide a discussion

of the results and implications for future research and practice.

1.1 |Information sharing, communication

sequences, and information processing

Team information sharing is communication involving the introduction

of members' individually held knowledge into the team's public space.

It refers to the exchange of privately held information about the task

situation with the other members of the team. In crisis management

teams, members must share information about the task situation in

order to develop a shared and accurate understanding of the task situ-

ation that facilitates coordination and enables high‐quality decision‐

making (Cooke, Salas, Cannon‐Bowers, & Stout, 2000; Rico et al.,

2008). By exchanging information about the situation, teams may not

yet create a shared understanding but a shared body of information

that constitutes the input for higher level information processing. For

example, studies on cooperative work teams have observed the prac-

tice of “talking to the room,”in which team members express out loud

new information that is not directed at a specific individual but instead

to the room at large (Heath & Luff, 1992; Kolbe et al., 2014; Waller &

Uitdewilligen, 2008). By expressing information aloud in this manner,

teams create common ground—a shared knowledge base combined

with the “awareness”that the knowledge is shared—that can serve as

an input for collective sensemaking (Clark & Brennan, 1991).

Extending this work and drawing from the situation awareness

theory of Endsley (1995), we suggest a model of team information

sharing encompassing three levels: fact sharing, interpretation sharing,

and projection sharing. Situation awareness refers to the dynamic

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