is at least as important as identifying the incident commander.
Both for safety and practical reasons, it is important that an
organisation is always clear as to who commands whom and
how both responsibility and authorities is distributed. It is the
employer (the person in charge) who ultimately determines
which risks can be taken in order to achieve a specific objective,
even if the employee must also be able to make this assessment.
Especially in conjunction with emergency response operations, it
can be difficult for a person in charge to make the entire assess-
ment alone, for among other reasons because this person does not
normally have access to the inside of a burning building.
A fire chief is always the senior commander and thus responsible,
regardless of whether he or she is at the incident site or not. On
the other hand, the role of incident commander, for example, can
change during an ongoing response. The incident commander role
should logically be held by the person having the greatest benefit
of the associated authorities, or who can be considered as most
competent, based on the situation’s demands and needs. Here as
well, one should consider role logic and how one has chosen to or-
ganise in other respects. This can, for example, entail that it is not
necessarily the person with the highest formal competence at an
incident site who is the incident commander. This naturally also
depends on how one defines the competence concept.
However, one should keep in mind that as stipulated by law, an
incident commander leads response operations and he or
she decides how they will be conducted and which rescue
measures will be taken. The purpose of appointing an inci-
dent commander is to make emergency response operations
as effective as possible and to avoid uncertainty as to who is
responsible for efforts in conjunction with the operation.
Incident commanders have been assigned special authorities and
duties in relationships with third parties in leading operations.
Among other things, there is the issue of measures that entail the
exercise of authority.
Delegation, decisions and exercise of authority
Delegation entails that one transfers decisionmaking rights
to another person (Andersson, et al., 2002). The entity or the
individual having the authority to make decisions in a specific