Leadership & interorganizational coordination: public services facing CBRN attacks[Leadership & Coordination interservices : les services publics face au risque attentat]

This communication aims to examine how leadership contributes to inter-agency coordination in the case of a crisis situation. Indeed, in the face of the threat of terrorism, where experience has shown the importance of effective inter-agency collaboration, and in light of the evolution of operational doctrine orchestrating the phases and roles of various security and emergency actors involved in such events, Weick & Roberts' (1993, 2007) high reliability organizing must be observed at an interorganizational level. To study a plurality of services that include highly hierarchical systems (Carson et al., 2007; Friedrich et al., 2016), we connect collective leadership (Contractor et al., 2012) to Lenesley's (2022) work on inter-agency coordination. Then, we present the results of a non-participant observation of an inter-agency exercise and semi-structured interviews. The communication leads to exploratory interim results highlighting the mutual links between collective leadership and inter-agency coordination, key elements of a high reliability response from security and emergency actors.