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1. Introduction
In the face of adversity and increasing number and frequency of natural and man-made disasters, countries nowadays try to make every possible effort to establish and maintain adequate levels of nationwide resilience. Enterprise resilience is considered to be a foundation of national resilience and can be achieved by improving organizational response capabilities to major incidents (Rogers et al., 2016; Sawalha, 2015).
Major incident management is a multi-stage process. It is often referred to as management “cycle” that goes through a chain of interrelated activities and the term resilience brings together the components of the disaster cycle – response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness – using a range of structural and non-structural approaches (O’Brien and Read, 2005).
During major incidents, panic is the first wide-spread observable attitude within the workplace. According to Mawson (2005), panic represents an inappropriate (or excessive) reaction to a stimulus. It considers the movement of people in public spaces as uncoordinated objects that behave irrationally, selfishly, competitively and against social norms. An expected consequence of panic is crowd crushing and subsequently failure to respond effectively and survive. Panic also affects emergency planning negatively (Moore and Lakha, 2006).
Shaw (2001) defined panic in the context of major incidents in a very simplistic way as: “running away because one is scared”. The author mentioned that this kind of behaviour is common in that, unless the danger is very obvious, people need information before they will begin to react. The author also raised a significant question: “Does one have the freedom to run into a crowded theatre and shout ‘Fire!’?”. The assumption underlying this question is that the impact will be blind panic and people trapped and crushed in doorways.
Response is the first stage in major incident management. It represents the immediate human reaction produced in reply to an incident. Therefore, effective and organized response reduces panic and determines the success of all subsequent stages, as well as corresponding management decisions (Coppola, 2011; Donnelley, 2007).
The success of the major incident management cycle and subsequently achieving resilience is not an option nowadays but a necessity, obligation and commitment from governments towards their societies and from organizations towards their employees (Gaillard, 2007). Effective response also guides communications and performance during an incident. In...