Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of transformational leadership – broadly defined as an individual who is visionary, innovative, inspirational and sensitive to the needs of followers – on the level of organizational resiliency.Design/methodology/approach: – This study employs multiple hierarchical regression analysis to test the causal relationship between transformational leadership and organizational resiliency by utilizing 112 respondents working in emergency management departments of local governments, fire and police stations, and nonprofit organizations in the Southeastern Economic Region of South Korea.Findings: – The results of the analysis indicate that transformational leadership style has a positive and statistically significant effect on perceived organizational resiliency. The findings also indicate that elected officials such as mayors are more likely to focus on building organizational resiliency than appointed officials and nonprofit leaders.Originality/value: – This study fills the gap of the current literature in the field of emergency management by establishing empirical evidence of the need to identify leaders with transformational traits in order to build a resilient organization, which can better respond and adapt to a catastrophic event in the Asian context.

International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) have played critical roles in improving the quality of primary health care in ordinary time and, indeed, responding to epidemic crises in developing countries. Due to a lack of empirical research for effectiveness of their responding activities, the legitimacy and accountability of nonprofits’ engagement in the health crisis as a critical responder is doubted. This paper aims to examine the effectiveness of INGOs in a context of managing a fatal epidemic outbreak of Ebola in Sierra Leone during May–November, 2014; building healthcare infrastructures, providing medical supplies, educating local residents, and training response staffs. The analysis results show that development of healthcare infrastructures and provision of medical supplies have been significantly effective in terms of decreasing the severity of the crisis in chiefdoms. The findings imply that policy tools, which allow INGOs to enter to the field in a timely manner, can improve the effectiveness of INGOs’ responses in current and future epidemic outbreaks in developing countries where people suffer from a lack of health infrastructures.

Following the 2003 the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea, this research aims to explore and examine the factors influencing the response to infectious diseases, which encompasses both communicable and non-communicable diseases. Through a qualitative research method, this research categorizes the factors as inputs, processes and outputs and applies them into the 2003 SARS and MERS outbreak in South Korea. As the results conducted meta-analyses to comprehensively analyze the correlations of factors influencing disaster response from a Korean context, the findings show that the legislative factor had direct and indirect influence on the overall process of infectious disease response and that Leadership of the central government, establishment of an intergovernmental response system, the need for communication, information sharing and disclosure and onsite response were identified as key factors influencing effective infectious disease response.