The current paper reviews essential aspects of one of the organizations that make part of the Department of Homeland Security. That organization is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is also going to be referred to as FEMA further throughout the paper. Despite the relatively young age of the Department of Homeland Security, the FEMA managed to create a household name for itself after the terrorist attacks that occurred on the 11th of September in 2001 (Canton, 2019). The idea behind creating an agency that would be responsible solely for emergency situations stems from the idea that the government could integrate several organizations in a single one in order to unite organizations with the help of the same mission and functions. In turn, the FEMA established improved control and security over the American lands and other regions that could be located outside the continental United States. The current paper reviews FEMA’s organizational structure in great detail and introduces the readers to numerous crucial aspects that distinguish it from any other governmental organization.
Organizational Culture
Even though the organization does not practice excessive public relations, its statements are always concise and released in a timely manner in order for the population to gain enough knowledge regarding potential issues that could affect the country or some of its regions. There are no specific ways in which FEMA tends to convey the information, but the most common means of communication for the agency are printed sources, mass media, and radio (Choi & Wehde, 2020). A variety of specialists are involved in the process of controlling the equipment available to the FEMA, as the organization has to be careful in terms of what it prioritizes the most and what are the incentives that bear the most importance for the United States and its citizens. Due to the most common threats evolving continuously, the FEMA also tends to attract experienced professionals to its research and development activities in order to make the best use of reverse engineering and prevent certain events before they are even planned.
The human resources section is also driven by experienced individuals who share their knowledge with subordinates in order to make it easier to protect the country from both internal and external threats of all kinds. The FEMA hardly conducts any market research, so it does not feature any employees that possess crucial marketing knowledge (Hu & Kapucu, 2016). Either way, the information acquired by the FEMA is often the most relevant and up-to-date, depending on what kind of event has to be covered. Each of the specialists discussed above possesses a set of interpersonal and interprofessional skills that are required to communicate vital messages quickly and ensure that the population is safe and has access to all crucial resources (Luna & Pennock, 2018). The current support from the government motivates FEMA employees to invest more time in learning and development, making it safe to say that the organization benefits from numerous experts in a variety of fields.
Organizational Structure
According to the existing information on the subject, there are no clear designations of how tasks are defined and allocated because FEMA intends on not making its operations available to the public at all times (Martinez, Talbert, Romero-Steiner, Kosmos, & Redd, 2019). Nevertheless, the management addresses the research and development unit often in order to improve operations and create room for operations that would prevent the majority of adverse incidents or at least speed up the response time. The organization does not conduct constant marketing research, but its statements come out on time, and the management never hesitates to implement new operations and tasks when necessary (Shultz & Galea, 2017). No details regarding the costs of the organization’s operations were found, but it may be safe to say that the expenditures aimed at safeguarding the US are huge (yet fully justified by the growing number of inside and outside threats). Overall, it may be concluded that FEMA pays close attention to standardization, but it does not cover all of the organizational areas to stay away from complete standardization, as it might cause a devastating experience in the case of unexpected events.
The organization features a central recruiting and interviewing procedure, which allows FEMA human resources managers to pick the most appropriate staff members to complete specific tasks (Hines & Reid, 2020). The rationale behind this is that the challenging nature of threats characteristic of the US requires every team member to possess a set of position-specific capabilities that may be expected to prevent FEMA from exposing itself to crucial vulnerabilities. The managers and foremen, on the other hand, are not selected with the help of any standard procedures due to the obsolete nature of procedural selection (Canton, 2019). In other words, FEMA picks required team members based on their expert aptitude and does not implement any selection procedures that would require an election-like procedure. All penalties are included in the standard protocol, as there are no changes that FEMA might address over time in regard to set offenses. Nevertheless, the management is always ready to bring more standardization into the hiring process in order to ensure that only individuals with essential skill sets make it to FEMA.
Organizational Diversity
The FEMA Chief Executive is responsible for managing the majority of operations that range from resource allocation and marketing to top-tier decision-making and human resource management. This high level of authority is necessary to ensure that the team is going to align its operations against the vision that may be expected to stabilize intraorganizational relationships and drive innovation at the same time (Meadow, Guido, Crimmins, & McLeod, 2016). In a local department of FEMA, the overall number of direct workers per first-line supervisor does not exceed 30, as the team is always willing to retain focus and address each of their tasks without taking the time to deal with all kinds of top-down bureaucracy (Kapucu & Garayev, 2016). Due to the nature of FEMA, it does not feature a rather high percentage of employees who represent indirect personnel. This means that the majority of work completed within the organization is subject to strict control. No information was found regarding the exact percentage of employees in each functional specialism, which makes it safe to say that FEMA protects vital organizational data in order to respond to incidents more efficiently and also safeguard individual employees from adverse external influence.
Organizational Diagnosis
The FEMA does possess an employee handbook where all the crucial organizational rules and regulations are included. An organizational chart with the decisive stakeholders is also included, which makes it easier to point out the essential actors in the life of the agency and its future initiatives. The presence of an organizational chart provides the audience with a better understanding of how FEMA functions and what are the tasks that it is most likely to delegate to different actors making part of the team (Martinez et al., 2019). On the other hand, no job descriptions and terms of reference were found in regard to FEMA employees, which makes it evident that the organization pays close attention to its security measures and does a lot of extracurricular work in order to protect the local population from the most vivid threats. Production meetings are rather common for FEMA because management monitors all of the team activities and ensures that the organization takes all the necessary measures to prevent and respond to threats in a timely manner.
When it comes to the question of centralization, one of the most important findings is that in order to make decisions related to supplies and resources, the decision-making party within FEMA has to possess the authority of an Administrator (Bachmann, Jamison, Martin, Delgado, & Kman, 2015). This strict separation is necessary to avert any of the subordinate units claiming their rights to essential resources that could be utilized when responding to an unexpected incident (as it persistently occurs with hurricanes across the US). On the other hand, the price of the output is often on the regional administrators and their deputy counterparts who look for the best options and try to reduce the costs of operations for FEMA (Kapucu & Garayev, 2016). The Chief of Staff may be seen altering the responsibilities or areas of work of departments when necessary, but it is also rather common to see an Associate Administrator taking care of such inquiries. Lastly, FEMA does not exert a lot of effort when it comes to marketing procedures, but the majority of such activities are directed by the Office of External Affairs and the Office of Regional Operations.
Overall, FEMA may be reviewed through the prism of resource dependence theory, meaning that organizational structure and behavior affect its operations to an extent where the allocation and availability of raw materials cannot be ignored. According to Schiele, Ellis, Eßig, Henke, and Kull (2015), for example, resource dependence theory is an important asset for the organization because it improves the ability of the management to distinguish resource location and reallocate human resources in the most appropriate way to increase organizational performance. This idea makes FEMA a unique organization that controls its resources based on the existing balance of power and does not allow for decisions that could destabilize the company’s internal structure. The current state of affairs at FEMA shows that the team has carefully addressed the need to plan their activities strategically in the past, and now it celebrates relatively open access to resources that it could not afford before (Martinez et al., 2019; Schiele et al., 2015). For FEMA, it is crucial that the team is going to follow its objectives and not turn its back on the potential challenges related to organizational culture and the nonexistence of assets.
References
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