Focusing on Teams in Crisis Management Education: An Integration and Simulation-Based Approach

Crisis management teams occupy central roles in many normative models of crisis management; however, management education generally addresses neither the nature of such teams nor the capabilities necessary for them to be effective. To help address this situation, we integrate information from phase-based crisis management models with team dynamics theories and suggest which team capabilities play key roles for crisis management teams as they face emergent crises. Using this integration, we then explore simulation-based training as a means to teach and assess crisis management team capabilities. We describe the design, development, and implementation of a simulation for crisis management teams, and discuss future applications of simulation-based training for crisis management education.