'Leader airtime management and team effectiveness in emergency management command and control (EMCC) teams'.

We investigated the relation between leader airtime management and team effectiveness in Emergency Management Command and Control (EMCC) teams. Leader airtime management concerns leaders' interventions to structure who shares information when, using opening and closing statements to respectively stimulate or reduce information sharing. We coded leaders' airtime management statements across different meeting phases (structuring, information sharing, decision making) using video-recordings of 12 EMCC exercises involving two consecutive meetings each. Experts rated two components of team effectiveness: Team Situation Awareness (TSA) and Team Decision Making (TDM). We found that closing statements were more frequently used in the decision-making phase than in any other meeting phase. Also, leaders of teams with lower TSA used more opening statements in the decision-making phase of the first team meeting than leaders of teams with higher TSA. These results confirm the importance of the timing of leader airtime management for EMCC team effectiveness.