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Teams in organizations have weekly – or even daily – meetings to exchange information, generate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions. Yet, many team meetings are described as ineffective by the participants, due to either their design or dysfunctional communication practices within the meeting. To gain new insights into addressing these issues, this chapter goes back deep in history and discusses the origins and functions of group meetings. Building upon evolutionary theories of human behavior, the authors examine the evolutionary significance of meetings and the ways in which they were adaptive for our human ancestors. Drawing from this evolutionary perspective, we then compare meetings in ancestral times with their modern-day counterparts. Using evidence from (a) ethnographic studies of small-scale societies that model ancestral group life and (b) organizational and team science, we contrast the typical workplace meeting with its ancient counterpart. In this review of ancient and modern meetings, we identify meeting characteristics that have been maintained through time as well as those that are unique/new in the modern time. In doing so, we inspect to what extent meeting practices in ancestral environments are aligned or at odds with meeting practices in contemporary organizations (the notion of mismatch). From these similarities and differences, we derive novel theoretical insights for the study of workplace meetings as well as suggestions for improving contemporary meeting practice. We also include a series of testable propositions that can inform future research on team meetings in organizations.

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.

Research into the library as place investigates the role of public library buildings as destinations, physical places where people go for various reasons ranging from making use of the library's resources and services or seeking to fulfill an information or reading need to less easily identified reasons that may include using the library's building as a place to make social or business contacts, to build or reinforce community or political ties, or to create or reinforce a personal identity. This study asks: How are one rural US public library system's newly constructed buildings functioning as places? The answer is derived from answers to sub-questions about adult library users, user, and staff perceptions of library use, and observed use of library facilities. The findings are contextualized using a framework built of theories from human geography, sociology, and information studies.

This case study replicates a mixed-methods case study conducted at the main public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver in the late1990s and first reproduced in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006. It tests methods used in large urban settings in a rural, small-town environment. This study also expands on its antecedents by using thematic analysis to determine which conceptualizations of the role of the public library as place are most relevant to the community under investigation.

The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys and interviews of adult library users, interviews of library public service staff members, structured observations of people using the libraries, and analysis of selected administrative documents. The five sets of data are triangulated to answer the research sub-questions.

Thematic analysis grounded in the conceptual framework finds that public realm theory best contextualizes the relationships that develop between library staff members and adult library users over time. The study finds that the libraries serve their communities as informational places and as familiarized locales rather than as third places, and that the libraries facilitate the generation of social capital for their users.

Since we have seen in the previous chapter that only small part of the shareholder rights is harmonized at the European level, we explore the national regulations in this and the subsequent chapter. In this chapter, we focus in particular on procedural and information rights, including the organization of the meeting, forum rights and the disclosure of ownership information. We find that, inter alia, there are many differences in the national provisions regarding shareholder forum rights, despite article 9 of the Shareholder Rights Directive that provides shareholders with the right to ask questions. Also in the meeting’s organization there are large differences between countries, for example, regarding the use of EGMs.

Previous research on workplace meetings identified critical design features, leader behaviors, group dynamics, post-meeting actions, and other factors which help determine the effectiveness of the meeting. But as much as the authors acknowledge that meetings may differ from each other, much of the research appears to assume that it is meaningful to talk about “the meeting” as a single, generic entity (most commonly, the regularly scheduled staff or department meeting). In fact, though, there are several common types of meetings which vary among themselves in terms of a number of measurable parameters such as structure, meeting members, meeting leader, timing and duration, and scope. It is a gratuitous assumption that what the authors know about workplace meetings based on one especially common type applies to all workplace meetings. This chapter offers a historical review of previous attempts to classify meeting types; it then overviews several common types which deviate from the standard staff meeting paradigm, including project team meetings, debrief meetings, committee meetings, site-wide meetings, shift change meetings, and crew formation meetings. In comparing these types to the staff meeting, the authors identify some of the critical differences, thereby providing a first step toward a true taxonomy of meetings.

Meetings are ubiquitous at work. Therefore, understanding what makes meetings effective (or not) is important. Entitativity (i.e., the “group-ness” of a meeting) may theoretically explain when some meetings are effective. That is, when meeting participants perceive a high enough level of group-ness in their meeting, then they begin to enact the processes to create a successful meeting and experience the outcomes of a successful meeting. The authors propose a model connecting the characteristics of successful face-to-face (FtF) meetings to entitativity and extrapolate this model to online meetings. Specifically, the authors interpret well-researched characteristics and practices of meetings (e.g., using an agenda and meeting punctuality) to be examples of well-established entitativity antecedents (e.g., creating similarity of goals and establishing meeting boundaries). That is, using an agenda creates effective meetings because it focuses members’ attention on common goals. Therefore, entitativity may be an explanatory mechanism for successful meetings. The authors examine the unique challenges of online meetings, which are growing in number. The authors note that entitativity may be harder to establish in online meetings making successful online meetings more difficult. Characteristics of online meetings (e.g., focusing on the few shared documents which may focus members on goals) that may promote success. The authors propose further theoretical work as well as suggest strategies that can be used to increase entitativity in FtF and online meetings.

Across different research fields, it is increasingly acknowledged that gender is not a binary variable and goes beyond the male–female dichotomy. At the same time, gender is a prominent social cue that affects evaluations and interactions among individuals. Thus, gender can impact social processes on many levels in complex ways. Meetings provide arenas where key social processes unfold that are relevant to the organization. Understanding which role gender takes in this context is therefore central to organizations as well as meeting research. This chapter provides a critical review of research to date on social influence in meetings, specifically zooming in on the role of gender. The authors conducted a multi-step systematic literature review and identified 43 studies across a wide area of disciplines (e.g., psychology, communication, and management). The authors put special emphasis on the methodologies employed across this work since a comprehensive understanding of the applied methods is core for a synthesis of research results. Through the analysis, the authors pinpoint six variables – individual gender, sex role orientation, gender composition, gender salience, contextual factors such as task type and organizational settings, and the construction of gender as a social concept – that are directly related to gender and which represent factors that are critical for the role of gender in the meeting context. Thereby, this chapter aims to provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of gender during workplace meetings. The authors conclude by highlighting methodological and managerial recommendations and suggest avenues for future research.

With an increasingly diverse workforce, teams need to handle differences among team members and be aware of the impact these differences have on team meetings. As meetings are strongly shaped by team member interactions, communication between team members is central to meeting success. In diverse teams, effective communication and information sharing is even more crucial than in homogeneous groups due to distinct perspectives and knowledge that group members bring to a team. However, effective communication is also more challenging in groups with diverse members than in homogeneous groups. Especially when there is a strong faultline, that is, when multiple attributes align and teams fall into subgroups, communication within the whole team is impaired and might only take place within subgroups. In this chapter, the authors discuss the role of faultlines in meeting interactions and turn to subgroup formation and its impact on interaction patterns within teams. The authors see intersubgroup communication as an important process that links faultlines to meeting outcomes such as performance or satisfaction. By spanning research areas connecting faultline and meeting research, the authors provide scholars with important research questions to be examined in the future. The authors further introduce a new measure of intersubgroup communication that provides insights into dynamics between subgroups. By relating intersubgroup communication to overall communication within a meeting and taking team size as well as different subgroup constellations into account, this measure facilitates studying intersubgroup communication in meetings. The authors provide formulas that scholars could apply to their research.

Meetings are an integral function in organizations where interaction between leaders and their employees and thus, leadership, happens. A small but growing area of research within the larger workplace meetings domain has started to focus on the role of leaders in promoting effective and satisfying meetings. This chapter provides an overview of research to date on workplace meetings and leadership, and the authors identified seven studies that paired the two areas. The number of publications focusing on meetings and leadership is increasing, with the older papers largely dedicated to qualitative investigations of leader behaviors associated with successful meetings, whereas the more recent papers take a more theoretical and quantitative approach, yet are nonetheless largely isolated from one another. Next, the authors review five theories of leadership (full range of leadership, charismatic leadership, servant leadership, exploitative leadership, and followership), and relate each of the theories to workplace meetings, with a key focus on how the theory may impact subordinates’ perceptions of meetings as well as the utility of meetings for team and organizational functioning. The authors propose seven areas throughout the chapter that future research could explore to extend knowledge about how leadership operates in meetings and how meetings are an important aspect to consider with respect to leadership theories. Primary theoretical contributions are the integration of existing work on leadership and meetings and theoretically based propositions for future research.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!