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Due to their crucial and highly consequential task, it is of utmost importance to understand the levers leading to effectiveness of multidisciplinary emergency management command-and-control (EMCC) teams. We argue that the formal EMCC team leader needs to initiate structure in the team meetings to support organizing the work as well as facilitate team learning, especially the team learning process of constructive conflict. In a sample of 17 EMCC teams performing a realistic EMCC exercise, including one or two team meetings (28 in sum), we coded the team leader’s verbal structuring behaviors (1,704 events), rated constructive conflict by external experts, and rated team effectiveness by field experts. Results show that leaders of effective teams use structuring behaviors more often (except asking procedural questions) but decreasingly over time. They support constructive conflict by clarifying and by making summaries that conclude in a command or decision in a decreasing frequency over time.

The development of a team situation model (TSM), a shared understanding of the current situation developed by team members moment by moment, and its impact on team effectiveness have received minor attention in team research. This study investigates a moderated mediation model including the relationship between the team learning processes of co-construction and constructive conflict, the TSM, and team effectiveness. Forty-seven emergency management command-and-control teams participated in this field study. Their task was to manage a realistic emergency simulation developed and organized by field experts. The multi-rater approach included ratings of team members, researchers, and field experts. Results show that co-construction is related to the TSM under the condition of high constructive conflict. The TSM predicts team effectiveness in terms of the quality of actions at the incident scene.

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