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The purpose of this study was to investigate how a key meeting design characteristic, meeting size, affects the relationship between meeting effectiveness and task performance through employee engagement.

A three-wave time-lagged survey design was used to gather data concerning meeting experiences from employees for statistical model testing.

Using a moderated mediated path analysis, we found that effective meetings only translated into end-of-the-day task performance through engagement when the meeting size was small.

Although much research supports the current findings related to group size and meetings, meeting science has not investigated meeting design characteristics as levers to be pulled to enhance or detract from both meeting outcomes and organizationally desired outcomes. The findings, though are limited, due to potential common method bias, which was limited using methodological and statistical processes.

Managers and meeting attendees should consider how to maintain relatively small meeting size when possible so as to maximize both engagement and performance.

The current study is one of the few to look at meeting size directly as a moderator and helps demonstrate, once again, the importance of effectively designing meetings for success.

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.

Emotional labor is generally seen as a response to organizational display rules, which seek to guide the employee’s emotional expressions in such a way as to benefit the organization – generally by increasing customer satisfaction and fostering a positive regard for the organization itself. This study aims to investigate the degree to which a workshop intervention providing information about emotional labor and targeting effective coping strategies could have an effect on teachers’ burnout.

Using a sample of educators in primary and secondary schools, participants completed a pre-intervention survey, the training intervention and a post-intervention survey six months after the training.

Findings indicate that helpful coping strategy responses increased from pre-intervention to post-intervention. Regression tests showed the relationships between emotional labor and burnout weakened from time 1 to time 2.

These findings suggest that a brief, 60 min, intervention was effective in reducing the strength of the relationship between emotional labor and burnout. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

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.

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.

Data were obtained from three samples of working adults. The first was a convenience sample recruited by undergraduate students (n=120), the second was a stratified random sample from a metropolitan area in the southern USA (n=126), and the third was an internet‐based panel sample (n=402). Constant comparative analysis of responses to open‐ended questions was used to investigate the overarching research questions.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 per cent. 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.

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.

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 investigating the different types of meeting purposes in a broad range of organizational types and structures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of communication that occurs just before workplace meetings (i.e. pre-meeting talk). The paper explores how four specific types of pre-meeting talk (small talk, work talk, meeting preparatory talk, and shop talk) impact participants’ experiences of meeting effectiveness. Moreover, the authors investigate the role of participants’ personality in the link between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness.

Data were obtained using an online survey of working adults (n=252). Because pre-meeting talk has not been studied previously, a new survey measure of meeting talk was developed.

Pre-meeting small talk was a significant predictor of meeting effectiveness, even while considering good meeting procedures. Extraversion was identified as a moderator in this context, such that the relationship between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness was stronger for less extraverted participants.

The findings provide the first empirical support for the ripple effect, in terms of meetings producing pre-meeting talk, and suggest that pre-meeting talk meaningfully impact employees’ meeting experiences and perceptions of meeting effectiveness. To address limitations inherent in the cross-section correlational design of the study, future research should experimentally test whether pre-meeting talk actually causes changes in meeting processes and outcomes.

Managers should encourage their employees to arrive in time to participate in pre-meeting talk. Side conversations before a scheduled meeting starts can have beneficial effects for meeting outcomes and should be fostered.

There is very limited research on the role of pre-meeting talk. The authors identify that small talk is a predictor of meeting effectiveness even after considering previously studied good meeting procedures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of strategy messages emanating from both top and middle/supervisory managers regarding five different aspects of strategy on strategic awareness among boundary personnel.

The results come from a survey of bank tellers and customer service representatives within a single large regional bank.

The findings support a differential main effect on strategic awareness among boundary personnel depending on the source of messages, whether top management or middle management. More interestingly, there appears to be an interaction effect between the two sources regarding which will be the dominant information source for boundary personnel.

The survey data were collected within a single banking institution at one time point.

The results provide useful information concerning the efficacy of messages concerning strategy from middle and top management in organizations.

The paper extends past research by investigating different levels of strategic understanding within the firm across different levels and determining information dissemination strategies for increasing the level of strategic awareness among boundary personnel.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The results showed effective meetings only translated into end-of-the-day task performance through engagement when the meeting size was small.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Using a large firm-level data set, this paper examines total factor productivity (TFP) and its determinants in the Ecuadorian manufacturing sector in the period 2007–2018.

I analyze the role played by traditional TPF determinants, including internal firm characteristics, international trade activities, financial constraints and competition intensity. I contribute to the literature by presenting quantile regression results. Moreover, I analyze industry patterns, distinguishing between industries according to their technological intensity (following the organisation for economic co-operation and development classification).

My results confirm that firm age is positively related to TFP level but negatively related to TFP growth. I also find that being an exporter and an importer at the same time is associated with higher TFP levels and that this effect is higher than when being only an exporter or an importer. Additionally, l find that credit is positively related to TFP levels. Finally, I find that more competition is positively related to productivity in lower quantiles of output.

The results are the source of tools to propose policy recommendations, which are stated in the present document.

This paper aims to reopen the debate of firm productivity determinants in a developing country such as Ecuador. The authors use a set of covariates less analyzed in this issue.