ABSTRACT
Assessments of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina find the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) response a failure, the US Coast Guard’s relatively successful, and the response of other organizations variable. What explains this variation in organizational performance? The conventional wisdom is that the extraordinary nature of the event in terms of scale and regional impacts created an impossible task for response organizations at all levels of government. But these explanations fail to explain differences between organizations in terms of their performance. We argue that, the role of organizational culture in shaping responses to Hurricane Katrina needs to be considered in order to help explain the differences in organizational performance. This lens provides important insights about the response capabilities of various organizations and the way that leadership from these organizations handled criticism of their performance.
