Crisis response team decision-making as a bureau-political process

Given their different views and interests, how do liaisons in interorganizational crisis response teams negotiate collective decisions? We conducted an experiment with eight crisis response teams to answer this question. Taking a bureau-political view, we find that liaisons make decisions by following one of two decision-making pathways. First, liaisons claim some decisions as subject to their authority and make crisis response decisions independently. Second, when such authority claims are rejected or when no liaison claims decision-making authority, deliberative consensus-seeking takes place. Additionally, we find that crisis response team negotiations are primarily prompted by liaisons’ different views, although clashing organizational interests are nor irrelevant. We conclude that a bureau-political perspective helps to understand how liaisons reach collective crisis response decisions.