Formal Managerial Meetings: Are they effective or not?

Management research review, 2014

Purpose-Meetings are a workplace activity that deserves increased attention from researchers and practitioners. Previous researchers attempted to develop typologies of meeting purpose with limited success. Through a comparison of classification methodologies, we consider a taxonomy as the appropriate classification scheme for meeting purpose. The goal of our study is to propose a taxonomy of meeting purpose. We then utilize the developed taxonomy to investigate the frequency with which a representative sample of working adults engaged in meetings of these varying purposes. Our proposed taxonomy provides relevant classifications for future research on meetings and serves as a useful tool for managers seeking to use and evaluate the effectiveness of meetings within their organizations. Design/methodology/approach-This study employs an inductive methodology using discourse analysis of qualitative meeting descriptions to develop a taxomomy of meeting purpose. Our discourse analysis utilizes open-ended survey responses from a sample of working adults (N = 491). Findings-Our categorical analysis of open-ended questions resulted in a 16 category taxonomy of meeting purpose. The two most prevalent meeting purpose categories in this sample are "to discuss ongoing projects" at 11.6% and "to routinely discuss the state of the business" at 10.8%. The two least common meeting purpose categories in this sample are "to brainstorm for ideas or solutions" at 3.3% and "to discuss productivity and efficiencies" at 3.7%. The taxonomy is analyzed across organizational type and employee job level to identify differences between these important organizational and employee characteristics. Implications-The data suggest that meetings are institutionalized in organizations making them useful at identifying differences between organizations as well as differences in employees in terms of scope of responsibility. Researchers and managers should consider the purposes for which they call meetings and how that manifests their overarching organizational focus, structure, and goals. Originality/value-This is the first study to overtly attempt to categorize the various purposes for which meetings are held. Further, this study develops a taxonomy of meeting purposes that will prove useful for MEETING PURPOSE TAXONOMY 3 investigating the different types of meeting purposes in a broad range of organizational types and structures.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to propose a taxonomy of meeting purpose. Meetings are a workplace activity that deserves increased attention from researchers and practitioners. Previous researchers attempted to develop typologies of meeting purpose with limited success. Through a comparison of classification methodologies, the authors consider a taxonomy as the appropriate classification scheme for meeting purpose. The authors then utilize the developed taxonomy to investigate the frequency with which a representative sample of working adults engaged in meetings of these varying purposes. Their proposed taxonomy provides relevant classifications for future research on meetings as well and serves as a useful tool for managers seeking to use and evaluate the effectiveness of meetings within their organizations. Design/methodology/approach – This study employs an inductive methodology using discourse analysis of qualitative meeting descriptions to develop a taxonomy of meeting purpose. The authors discourse analysis utilizes open-ended survey responses from a sample of working adults (n  491). Findings – The authors categorical analysis of open-ended questions resulted in a 16-category taxonomy of meeting purpose. The two most prevalent meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to discuss ongoing projects” at 11.6 per cent and “to routinely discuss the state of the business” at 10.8 percent. The two least common meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to brainstorm for ideas or solutions” at 3.3 per cent and “to discuss productivity and efficiencies” at 3.7 per cent. The taxonomy was analyzed across organizational type and employee job level to identify differences between those important organizational and employee characteristics. Research limitations/implications – The data suggested that meetings were institutionalized in organizations, making them useful at identifying differences between organizations as well as differences in employees in terms of scope of responsibility. Researchers and managers should consider the purposes for which they call meetings and how that manifests their overarching organizational focus, structure and goals.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify how employees feel about having more meetings and what can be done to improve employees’ feelings about their work meetings. Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from three samples of working adults. The first was a convenience sample recruited by undergraduate students (n ¼ 120), the second was a stratified random sample from a metropolitan area in the southern USA (n ¼ 126), and the third was an internet-based panel sample (n ¼ 402). Constant comparative analysis of responses to open-ended questions was used to investigate the overarching research questions. Findings – It is found that employees enjoy meetings when they have a clear objective, and when important relevant information is shared. Consistent with conservation of resources theory, most employees are unhappy with meetings when they reduce their work-related resources (e.g. meetings constrain their time, lack structure and are unproductive). Practical implications – The data suggest that meetings appear to be both resource-draining and resource-supplying activities in the workplace. Researchers and managers should consider overtly asking about how people feel about meetings, as a means of identifying areas for future research inquiry and targets for improvement in the workplace generally. Originality/value – The paper describes one of the few studies on meetings that ask the participants overtly what their feelings are regarding their workplace meetings. Additionally, the paper illustrates the usefulness of qualitative data analysis as a means for further understanding workplace activities viewing respondents as informants.

Discourse Studies 14, 3–10, 2012

International Journal of Applied Research, 2019

The science of corporate meetings have assumed increased academic interest (Allen et al., 2008) in the past three decades seemingly due to increases in corporate scandals, increased corporate failures, rapid and disruptive changes in the business environment, growth in conglomerate structures, increased competition, and reduced product lifecycles. The present descriptive study seeks to critically analyse the significant role of corporate meetings as instruments for organizational effectiveness. There is limited research related to corporate meetings from a social network perspective. The corporation is the main form of corporate activity in any country; hence the proper functioning of the corporation is essential for economic development. Corporate meetings are essential in ensuring the alignment of corporate activities at various levels of the organization’s hierarchy. The effectiveness and alignment of all corporate meetings determines an organization’s overall effectiveness and subsequently economic performance. The research adopted an inductive methodology by means of discourse analysis and social network analysis of qualitative meeting descriptions with reference to four companies. The discourse analysis was important in understanding the ties in an interaction network. The social network analysis was applied to examine meetings interaction data among different levels of the organization’s hierarchy based on three fundamental social network theory constructs of bridging, closure and leader centrality. It is useful in visualizing and understanding the diverse relationships that either facilitate or impede knowledge sharing. The researcher adopted purposive sampling in order to assess the meetings in the four organizations. The interpretivist epistemological position was adopted based on the researcher’s first hand information about corporate meetings and the respondents’ last three corporate meetings and general workplace experience. The study was exploratory, explanatory, and predominantly descriptive. The study shows that corporate meetings save several purposes and are essential in driving organizational effectiveness. The nature of the aims and purposes of an organization varies at different levels of the organization’s hierarchy based on the extent of closure and bridging ties. Results show that all the six meetings, has an inclination towards discussions on the state of the business. In line with the hierarchical view of the corporation, the results from the analysis of the different meeting purposes indicate the power and politics differences in organizational life (Finkelstein, 1992). Meetings interaction is an important ingredient for organizational effectiveness as the different purposes at different organizational levels will be aligned. The study shows that when an organization’s strategy, goals, and activities are aligned, the organization will gain and sustain a competitive advantage.

Although advances in communication technology were once expected to diminish the need for synchronous work meetings, meeting activity in organizations continues to rise. Regrettably, the time and energy employees spend in work meetings is not matched by the amount of direct attention group and organizational scholars have paid to meeting phenomena. This special issue of Small Group Research helps to address this gap by presenting empirical studies of work meetings that explore the theory and practice of work meetings.

Meetings in organisations are a common object of popular frustration. They are often run by managers who picked up their meeting skills from their superiors a generation previously, thus perpetuating obsolescent practices unsuited to today's world of work. This paper reports on a research-based intervention effort to improve organisational meetings. It reconceptualises classical meeting management, offering instead the practice of 'meeting facilitation': a more active and supportive approach, in which the manager-as-facilitator guides and directs conversations in meetings towards a positive goal. To test this reconceptualisation in a live experiment intended to improve real meetings, we conducted brief training of 103 managers in meeting facilitation in two organisations in Denmark. A pre-and post-intervention survey of a thousand employees who regularly participated in these managers' meetings showed that in the employees' judgement, there were significant improvements in their managers' competencies in both new meeting facilitation and classical meeting management, whereas other meeting outcomes resisted change.

Business Horizons, 2019

Organizational Psychology Review, 2022

Given the focal role that group and team meetings play in shaping employees’ work lives (and schedules), the scarcity of conceptual and empirical attention to the topic in extant organizational psychology research is a major oversight that stalls scientific understanding of organizational behavior more broadly. With the explosion of meetings in recent years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some even wonder why organizational psychology has not already figured out meetings from both a science and practice perspective. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the extant literature on the science of workplace meetings and sort the works by identifying the key features of the meeting phenomenon. The five key features of workplace meetings identified include Leading, Interacting, Managing Time, Engaging, and Relating. We couch these features within a larger framework of how meetings are the intersection of collaboration in organizations and indispensable to organizational success...