A literature review of methods for providing enhanced operational oversight of teams in emergency management

Teamwork is an important component of effective emergency management. From time to time teamwork will break down in the complex situations involved in managing emergencies. It is important for people who have operational oversight of these teams to be able to detect breakdowns quickly and effectively. However, there is typically little guidance within many agencies about how best to do this. This paper reviews the literature on team monitoring by observers in emergency management and related domains and identifies four key approaches to monitoring teams: 1) coordination, cooperation and task-related communication; 2) information flow; 3) linguistic analysis; 4) team outputs. These methods provide a number of different options that agencies involved in emergency management can use as the basis for developing enhanced operational oversight of teams.