Participative or Directive Leadership Behaviors for Decision-Making in Crisis Management Teams?

We assess the relative value of participative and directive leadership for improving the accuracy and speed of decision-making in crisis management teams, contingent on whether teams face an emergency that is familiar or unfamiliar to them. Testing our theory, using randomized experiments, with 72 teams tasked with managing simulated crises, we found that participative leadership improves decision accuracy in unfamiliar emergencies, whereas directive leadership improves accuracy in familiar crises; directive leadership produces speedier decisions than participative leadership when the team is familiar with the crisis. We discuss implications of our findings for leaders and crisis management experts.