Resource sufficiency, organizational cohesion, and organizational effectiveness of emergency response

The main problem facing emergency managers during disasters are insufficient manpower and limited material resources. In emergency situations, the issue of inadequate resources arises from multiple emergency response teams who have different disaster perceptions, and end up allocating assets in an inefficient manner. These varying assessments are a result of erratic levels of involvement by the disaster management, which lead to the weakness of organizational cohesion. This study took Kaohsiung City in southern Taiwan as the subject and conducted a survey through questionnaires to explore the correlations among resource sufficiency, organizational cohesion, and organizational effectiveness in the emergency response. The questionnaires were then analyzed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, reliability analysis and path analysis. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Resource sufficiency should be the main priority for emergency response because of its direct correlation with organizational effectiveness, which in turn mediates the organizational cohesion; (2) Senior executives directly affect organizational cohesion and the organizational effectiveness; (3) Quality and quantity of the equipment and personnel have causal relationship with organizational effectiveness. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011