Non‐technical skills for emergency incident management teams: A literature review

Abstract

Every year, incident management teams (IMTs) coordinate the response to hundreds of emergency events across Australasia. Larger scale emergencies such as a storms, floods, wildfires, oil spills and chemical explosions can place a lot of pressure on an IMT. Non‐technical skills play a central role in the performance of these teams. This article reviewed the broader non‐technical skills (NTS) literature before focusing on the NTS required for emergency management. It was found that most NTS frameworks share four to five common skill categories, although there were greater differences at the element and behavioural marker level. A variety of issues were identified in the literature that highlight that emergency management is very different from other domains where NTS systems have been developed. The literature on NTS in conjunction with this set of issues was used to develop a proposed NTS framework for emergency IMTs. This framework comprises 7 skill categories (i.e. communication, coordination, cooperation, decision‐making, situation awareness, leadership and coping, stress and fatigue management). The 7 skills can be further delineated into 16 elements and 44 behavioural markers. The framework provides a prototype that can form the basis for further research in this area.

The COVID-19 marathon: demands and resources of crises managers in continuous operation

“…The JD-R proposes that job resources buffer the health-impairing effect of demands (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). For CMTs, job resources include a robust structure that functions also under adverse conditions and help CMTs to cope with unexpected demands (Hayes et al, 2021). Further, high team cohesion protects against emotional demands in highrisk environments (Tuckey & Hayward, 2011).…”

Virtual Reality Simulation for Emergency Management teams – A Literature Review

“…A recent study by Hayes et al (2021) reviewed the literature about non-technical skills (NTS) for IMTs. The authors identified that, in addition to communication, coordination, decision-making, and SA, cooperation and leadership are another NTS that improves team performance in EM.…”

Patterns of team adaptation: The effects of behavioural interaction patterns on team adaptation and the antecedent effect of empowering versus directive leadership

“…So far, TBIPs literature paid attention to the amount, length and complexity of patterns but not to their composing specific behaviours (Lei et al, 2016;Stachowski et al, 2009;Zijlstra et al, 2012). Thus, in line with recent reviews, a valuable contribution would be to identify which specific behavioural patterns foster team adaptation, for teams to incorporate them in their behavioural repertoires (Hayes et al, 2021). Further, although we studied a bigger sample of teams than in previous studies (Stachowski et al, 2009;Zijlstra et al, 2012) and we considered more data for each team (60 min of audio-visual coded material), future studies shall address the generalisability of our findings.…”

“…These managerial recommendations are applicable to training emergency incident management teams and search and rescue teams (Hayes et al, 2021;Okita et al, 2021), but overall to enhance the effectiveness of leading frontline workers (i.e., frontline command- Groenendaal & Helsloot, 2016), such as firefighter teams. Our results globally suggest leading frontline teams in an empowering way that enables teams in self-managing their tasks, which extant research has related with improved frontline work performance (Groenendaal et al, 2013).…”