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Employees at all organizational levels spend large portions of their work lives in meetings, many of which are not effective. Previous process-analytical research has identified counterproductive communication patterns to help explain why many meetings go wrong. This study aims to illustrate the ways in which counterproductive – and productive – meeting behaviors are related to individual work engagement and emotional exhaustion.

The authors built a new research-based survey tool for measuring counterproductive meeting behaviors. An online sample of working adults (N = 440) was recruited to test the factor structure of this new survey and to examine the relationships between both good and bad meeting behaviors and employee attitudes beyond the meeting context.

Using structural equation modeling, this study found that counterproductive meeting behaviors were linked to decreased employee engagement and increased emotional exhaustion, whereas good meeting behaviors were linked to increased engagement and decreased emotional exhaustion. These relationships were mediated via individual meeting satisfaction and perceived meeting effectiveness.

The study findings provide a nuanced view of meeting outcomes by showing that the behaviors that people observe in their meetings connect not only to meeting satisfaction and effectiveness but also to important workplace attitudes (i.e. employee engagement and emotional exhaustion). In other words, managers and meeting leaders need to be mindful of behavior in meetings, seek ways to mitigate poor behavior and seek opportunities to reward and encourage citizenship behavior.

This study shows how good and bad meeting behaviors relate to employee perceptions of meeting effectiveness and individual job attitudes. The authors develop a science-based, practitioner-friendly new survey tool for observing counterproductive meeting behavior and offer a juxtaposition of good and bad meeting behaviors in a single model.

Meetings are ubiquitous in organizational life and are a great source of frustration and annoyance to many employees in the workplace, in part due to counterproductive meeting behaviors (CMBs). CMBs include engaging in irrelevant discussion, complaining about other attendees, arriving to the meeting late, and other similar, disruptive behaviors. Consistent with conservation of resources theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the potential resource draining effect of CMBs on two key workplace attitudes/behaviors, employee voice, and coworker trust.

The authors used Amazon’s MTurk service to recruit a sample of full-time working adults from a variety of industries who regularly attend meetings. Participants completed a survey with items relating to CMBs, trust, voice, and meeting load.

The authors found that CMBs were indeed negatively related to both employee voice and coworker trust. Further, both of these relationships were even more negative for those who had fewer meetings (i.e. meeting load as a moderator).

The results of this study suggest that behavior in meetings may spill over and impact employees in other areas of their work life, perhaps harming other important work-related outcomes (e.g. performance). The cross-sectional nature of the sampling strategy is a limitation that provides opportunities for future research as discussed.

The practical implications are rather straightforward and poignant. Managers and meetings leaders should seek ways to reduce CMBs and promote good meeting processes generally.

The current study is the first to overtly investigate CMBs in workplace meetings and connect them to meaningful, non-meeting-related, outcomes. Further, the study shows the usefulness of conservation resources theory for explaining the dynamic processes that occur for meeting attendees.

Maintaining and protecting employee well-being and health is of paramount importance for organizations in order to prevent financial losses due to illness, absenteeism, and fluctuation. This chapter discusses the role of team meetings for employee well-being. As the contemporary workplace is shaped by team work, team meetings increasingly shape employees’ experiences at work. As such, team meetings may also have a major influence on employee well-being as they consume large amounts of time and thus strongly influence workers’ schedules. While previous research has predominantly focused on negative aspects of meetings and mainly considered them as a workplace stressor, this chapter advances a positive perspective on meetings as opportunities for boosting rather than impairing employee well-being. Upon reviewing the extant evidence about linkages between workplace meetings and well-being, the authors highlight the role of team dynamics during meetings for individual well-being and suggest new perspectives for future research. The authors also discuss actionable implications for structuring and facilitating meetings in order to avoid negative and increase positive effects of team meeting interactions on employee well-being.

This paper aims to examine the effects of age on counteractive team meeting behaviors (e.g. complaining). Forgiveness is included as a potential buffer against these behaviors. A multilevel model is developed to test individual and team level age effects.

A total of 313 employees nested in 54 teams completed a forgiveness questionnaire and were videotaped during regular team meetings.

Multilevel modeling revealed that both individual age and average team age predicted counteractive team meeting behavior. Team level age diversity was linked to decreased counteractive behavior. Forgiveness moderated the negative link between individual age (but not team average age) and counteractive behavior.

This is the first study examining age effects in the context of counteractive meeting behavior. Although the authors' findings need to be substantiated in further research, they show that older team members engage in significantly more counteractive communication – forgiveness can help alleviate this effect.

Teams with older team members should be sensitized to avoid counteractive behavior. Moreover, team composition should target high age diversity. Managerial interventions should also aim to facilitate forgiveness in the work environment, especially among older team members.

Research on dysfunctional team meeting behavior is sparse, and the role of age effects has not been examined in this context. The authors identify a significant link between age and counteractive meeting behavior. This multilevel model shows differential effects of individual age, team average age, and age diversity on counteractive communication. Furthermore, a buffer against these dysfunctional behaviors is identified: forgiveness.

This study examined the relationship between safety climate and employees' voluntary work behaviours (i.e. organisational citizenship behaviour and counterproductive work behaviour). It also examined the moderating role of employees' voice on the relationship between safety climate and employees' voluntary work behaviours.

Using the quantitative survey research design, data were collected from 220 respondents from three manufacturing companies in Accra, Ghana. Pearson's correlation test (r) and hierarchical multiple regression were used for data analysis.

Results showed that safety climate plays a significant role in predicting employees' voluntary work behaviours. Also, employees' voice was found to moderate the relationship between safety climate and organisational citizenship behaviour but does not moderate the relationship between safety climate and counterproductive work behaviour.

Data was collected from manufacturing firms in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana; hence, the findings may be limited to just the manufacturing industry in the Ghanaian setting.

This paper positions safety climate as a catalyst for positive voluntary work behaviours in the workplace and an antidote to negative workplace behaviours. It also highlights the role of employees' voice in enhancing positive voluntary workplace behaviours of employees.

During team meetings, expressing negativity about other team members’ ideas and contributions – that is, negative disagreements – can derail team processes and harm team productivity. If team members want to improve their meetings and reduce negativity, which aspects are relevant starting points? This chapter discusses the complexity of this question by considering the interplay of team attributes, individual characteristics, and verbal interaction dynamics that may evoke negative disagreements in meetings. To this end, this chapter relies on existing behavioral and survey data of 259 employees nested in 43 team meetings that were analyzed using statistical discourse analysis. The results of this analysis highlight several potential starting points for reducing negativity in workplace meetings. First, we discovered that team attributes matter, as teams with a lower overall level of job satisfaction were more likely to experience negative disagreements during their meetings. Second, at the individual level, we found a significant gender effect such that women were more likely than men to start negative disagreements. Third, individual team members reporting lower organizational trust were more likely to start negative disagreements. Finally, counter to previous work on interaction dynamics during meetings, we could not identify specific verbal behaviors that triggered negative disagreements. In terms of practical implications, we discuss how managers can increase organizational trust and job satisfaction (e.g., through ensuring justice and improving job design) in order to encourage more positive meeting interactions.

Meetings are a necessary part of work. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how power distance in meetings affects emotional labor, including whether leader-member exchange (LMX) serves as a moderator for this relationship. It is hypothesized that power distance in meetings would lead to higher levels of emotional labor in meeting attendees, and that higher levels of LMX would make this relationship even stronger.

The authors used a panel sample of full-time working adults from a variety of industries who regularly attend meetings. Participants completed a survey with items related to power distance, emotional labor, and LMX. Hypotheses were tested using moderated regression.

Findings reveal that power distance between the meeting leader and attendees does relate positively to emotional labor, both surface and deep acting. In addition, LMX moderates this relationship for deep acting, but not for surface acting indicating that when high levels of both power distance and LMX exist, meeting attendees will engage in more deep acting.

The results of this study suggest that meeting leaders influence the behavior of attendees through their perceived power and relationship with the attendees. The power distance measure and cross-sectional nature of the sampling strategy is a limitation that provides opportunities for future research.

The practical implications focus on meeting leaders, how they can help meeting attendees make meetings successful by expressing their true authentic emotions.

The current study is one of the first to focus on the power distance present in meetings related to emotional regulation through the social comparison theory. In addition, the current study investigates how LMX can serve as a moderator in this relationship.

Drawing on social identity theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether social undermining significantly influences employee voice (or silence) and organizational deviant behavior in the hotel industry regarding three types of social undermining: by supervisor, coworker and customer.

The study provided a self-administered questionnaire to 344 five-star hotel employees in South Korea. SPSS (version 22.0) and AMOS (version 20.0) were used to analyze the data.

Being undermined by customers negatively affects employee voice and positively affects employee silence. Supervisor and coworker undermining also negatively affects employee voice and positively affects employee silence. Employee voice does not significantly affect organizational deviant behavior, but employee silence significantly affects deviant employee behavior. This was also verified by the potential mediating effect of supervisor undermining on silence as a form of deviant employee behavior.

This study contributes to the development of long-term manager-centered measures to combat the effect of social undermining among frontline employees in the hotel industry. It can be difficult to differentiate clearly between the conflicts and stress experienced by employees at the service frontline and the social undermining they experience during diverse social interactions. In confirming the effects of social undermining on employees at a five-star hotel, the study also found no clear organizational provisions or legal recourse for victims. The findings suggest that hotel employees are easily exposed to social undermining as a result of the industry culture and socialization process.