Managing Pandemics – Demands, Resources, and Effective Behaviors within Crisis Management Teams: Online Supplement

This is the online supplement for a study by the University of Muenster, Germany, in cooperation with the State Fire Service Institute NRW, Germany. The study is part of a larger research project and examined demands, resources, and effective behavior withing crisis management teams during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some emergencies – such as the COVID-19 pandemic – are so large that no individual nor any single municipality, organization or even country can handle them alone. These emergencies require multidisciplinary crisis management teams (CMTs). However, most existing CMTs are trained for rather local and temporary emergencies but not for international and long-lasting crises. Moreover, CMT members in a pandemic face additional demands due to unknown characteristics of the disease, and a highly volatile environment. To support and ensure the effectiveness of CMTs, we need to understand how CMT members can successfully cope with these multiple demands. Connecting teamwork research with the job demands and resources approach as starting framework, we conducted structured interviews and critical incident analyses with 144 members of various CMTs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analyses revealed both perceived demands as well as perceived resources in CMTs. Moreover, structuring work processes, open, precise and regular communication, and anticipatory, goal-oriented and fast problem solving were described as particularly effective behaviors in CMTs. We illustrate our findings in an integrated model, and derive practical recommendations for the work and future training of CMTs

The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology & Sports Science of the University of Münster (ID 2020-26-MT) and pre-registered with OSF (https://osf.io/p4wda/).

This online supplement includes

• an appendix with additional information on sample characteristics, 
• the interview guide (in English and German),
• raw data of quantitative variables and the codebook of variables.
  (Note: The raw data contains only the information of persons who were included in the analysis and have agreed to it. Some demographic information was deleted to ensure anonymity.)