Portsmouth Business School
Dr Katherine Devitt
Walking Through a Maze Backwards: Wearing a Blindfold and Juggling Lighted Sticks of Dynamite: A study on Effective Strategic Leadership of Multi-Agency Critical Incident Response Teams
Department: Strategy and Business Systems
Email: katherine.devitt@port.ac.uk
Nationality: British
Director of Studies: Professor Edward Borodzicz
Year of graduation: 2009
Thesis summary
Crises are constantly in the headlines - be they terrorist attacks (the Twin Towers, the Madrid and London bombings), accidents (the fuel depot incident at Buncefield which gave rise to the largest fire in the UK since World War 2) or natural disasters (tsunamis and flooding). Managing and containing such complex, life-threatening incidents is of increasing importance, so the paucity of academic research on crisis team leadership is surprising.
This research is intended to address the following issues:
- To identify what constitutes effective crisis management leadership in the context of a multi-agency strategic incident response, focusing on the interlinking of the roles of Category 1 responders such as the Police, Fire and Rescue Service, Health Service, Local Authorities and other key agencies.
- To consider what positive and negative factors might influence the effectiveness of leaders coordinating a strategic multi-agency response.
- To understand how the organisational cultures of the individual agencies affect the multi-agency response.
- To review the implications on the training of multi-agency strategic leaders.