An investigation of swift trust formation in disaster management teams

Due to the increasing vulnerability of developing nations to natural disasters, it is not uncommon for these countries to ask for international aid. Consequently, many developed nations send disaster management personnel to assist developing nations when responding to a natural disaster. Natural disasters present multi-national disaster management teams with numerous challenges and impose intense pressures, which provide little time for normal team formation processes to occur. The development of trust within multi-national disaster management teams is particularly important given the need for rapid responses under extreme time and resources pressures, where decisions often must be made outside of normal protocols. The newness of the teams, and the varied backgrounds from which they are drawn, further complicates this process of trust formation. However, within the disaster management literature, there is a lack of empirical evidence investigating how trust forms for local and international disaster management personnel responsible for coordinating a national operation.Addressing this lack of research and the poor conceptualisation of this important challenge, this thesis mobilises Meyerson, Weick and Kramer’s (1996) theory of Swift Trust in Temporary Systems to investigate the process of trust formation between disaster management personnel working in an Emergency Operations Centre. The research employs a single case study approach, focussing on the disaster response to Tropical Cyclone Winston in Fiji (2016). It utilises a triangulation of qualitative methods using semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis.Through deductive content analysis, it was found that swift trust did not exist between the disaster management personnel responding to Tropical Cyclone Winston. Rather, the results showed that trust formation was more aligned with the organisational theories of trust and dependent upon a colleague’s role, competency, and personality. Particularly, when forming trust, local disaster management personnel were looking for their international colleagues to humbly integrate into the operation and work under the national leadership. These results are significant because they provide new theoretical insights into trust development within multi-national disaster management teams, which have not been previously explored in the literature. In addition to this theoretical contribution, the findings provide important practical insights to help international disaster management personnel facilitate more effective disaster responses by building greater levels of trust with their local counterparts.