Teams Coordination In A Polycentric System: Insights From Pre-Hospital Emergency Teams

As our understanding of coordination is still messy and fragmented (Okhuysen and Bechky, 2009), some scholars further investigated coordination within a practice-based view (e.g. Bechky, 2006; Faraj and Xiao, 2006; Jarzabkowski et al., 2012; Peters and Pressey, 2016) to provide important insights into how actors coordinate in their situated activities. Among these practice-based contributions, some privilege extreme fields to investigate how teams actually coordinate when they are confronted to the unexpected. However, this body of research tends to underappreciate the multiple scales of institutional arrangements (Johns, 2006) that teams are daily involved in. The effect of "macro-arrangements" complexities on teams working and coordinating in extreme context is still to be investigated. Ostrom's contributions on polycentricity appears to be convenient to examine micro-situational interactions in broader field settings. In a polycentric system, individuals that belong to formally independent decision structures get together to achieve joint actions. They are collectively involved in diverse ways of providing outcomes. The Ostrom's view of polycentricity allows grasping the diverse influences of macro-arrangements on coordination practices in extreme contexts as they expose processes and issues that may remain hidden with a more micro-level analysis. In this article, we aim to dig into polycentricity to contribute with the following research question: how do polycentric systems influence teams' coordination practices in extreme contexts? We address our question in exploring coordination between pre-hospital emergency teams. Our case involves multiple rescue teams which must coordinate with each other while they do not necessarily report to the same decision centre, neither do they follow the same rules, procedures and norms.