Modern day crises demand organizations to collaborate and adapt to new roles, functions and structures. In such situations, lack of collaborative behaviour and openness between organizations can result in reduced adaptive ability.Therefore, it is important to facilitate collaboration between organizations.We have studied the extent to which crisis managers are prepared to work with personnel and resources from organizations other than their own when responding to crises. An experiment was designed with four different organizations in Sweden, which involved decision making concerning whether the participants systematically favoured their own organization over others. Findings indicate that increasing familiarity and expectation of future cooperation with other organizations increased the likelihood that decision makers would be prepared to work with other organizations in joint crisis management.

The European Union (EU) military Operation Headquarters (OHQ) construct has been described as a slow starter due to familiarization issues and an arena for parallel chains of command. Similarly, a recent study of a live OHQ showed national perspectives to be common, particularly with staff members from nations prominent in the operation. However, the nature of these flaws remains unclear while scholars debate if the EU OHQ can and should move towards civil-military integration. This paper investigates individual's national perspectives in an experimental setting with 180 civilian and military professionals related to crisis management. Manipulations include parent-nation prominence, familiarity with response units, and participants' ties to the parent-nation. The results show that national units are significantly favoured when more familiar to the participant compared with foreign units and when representing a minority in the multinational context.This partly mirrors previous findings. Importantly, no significant difference appears between military and civilian participants. It is concluded that the OHQ construct may be flawed by design by requiring a familiarization process, but that OHQ cohesion in terms of receptiveness to national influences would not necessarily change with civil-military integration.

Recent studies of the European Union crisis management capability argue for establishing a permanent Operations Headquarters (OHQ) instead of the temporary alternatives currently available. These studies picture temporary OHQs as slow starters hampered by multiple interests and a lack of common grounds. This paper corroborates these studies by reporting on the empirical findings of a year‐long case study of the EUFOR Tchad/RCA OHQ. The combined results of observations, interviews, and surveys indicate that national perspectives not only existed in the OHQ, but were also asymmetric in the sense that staff members from France and Ireland nations displayed stronger national perspectives than staff members from other nations. However, the general trust between staff members seems to have been largely unaffected by this. The findings also indicate a process of familiarization spanning over several months. This paper argues that temporary multinational headquarters are likely to work around frictions and mature into well‐functioning organization, but that this is a time‐consuming process in which national parallel chains of command may remain. Prior training should prepare staff members for this. In addition, leading nations need to understand their strong visibility and to be careful not to dominate the day‐to‐day staff work.

In an emergency response operation, trust can have an influence on the efficiency in communication between different decision makers and how the networks of these decision makers are formed. Consequently, it might affect the efficiency, flexibility, and adaptation capability in the response system as a whole. Trust could generally be described as a relation between a trustor and a trustee where the expected behavior and competence of the trustee in a specific context, estimated by the trustor, is a central core in the concept. On the basis of a literature review and interviews with Australian emergency response practitioners, this article discusses relevant characteristics of trust and its consequences in emergency response. The content emphasizes the need for further development of descriptive analysis of the processes underlying the formal charts and documents to understand authentic conditions and further develop valid normative theories for emergency response management.