Improving emergency service operations: the impact of organizational design and task environment

Purpose Serving the public sector, emergency response organizations operate in uncertain environments. This study aims to understand the impact of effective coordination and collaboration of volunteers and career responders on response time performance considering the complexity of their task environments measured as population density. The operations strategy models designed for manufacturing and services in the private sector provide overarching theoretical insights to explore the role of organizational design characterized by the mix of volunteers and career responders in the public sector emergency services. Design/methodology/approach This study uses hierarchical regression analysis to substantiate the theoretical model using publicly available data extracted from the US National Fire Incident Reporting System. The data is analyzed using the US National Fire Protection Association’s standard to define fire department organizational types working in differing task environments categorized as rural, suburban and urban, using population density from the US Census Bureau. Findings This study upholds the framework of operations strategy model for public services and finds that fire department organizational design and task environment significantly influence operational performance measured by incident response time. While increasing the percentage of career firefighters can improve response time for volunteer fire departments, once a threshold is achieved, such an increase does not help to improve incident response time for combination and career fire departments. Originality/value This study takes a fresh look at public emergency services using operations strategy models and explores the operational impact of fire department organizational design using the mix of volunteer and career firefighters under varying environmental conditions. While the findings are specific to one public emergency service domain, they open avenues for future research to extend these models to other emergency service types and public services.