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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.

Most studies on workplace meetings have examined them as physical gatherings but have not linked them to interactions before and after meetings. Drawing upon coordination theory, this study aims to examine the impact of interactions before, during and after meetings on meeting effectiveness.

A survey design was used, and regular workplace meeting attendees were recruited. A mediation model was developed to test the effect of interactions on perceived meeting effectiveness.

Interactions before meetings positively influenced attendee involvement during the meeting, and attendee involvement mediated the positive relationship between attendee interactions during the meeting and perceived meeting effectiveness. A novel finding of this study is that incorporating meeting outcomes in subsequent work positively influenced perceived meeting effectiveness because it fostered common understanding of the meeting agenda.

The present results link prior empirical findings on interactions before and during meetings to new predictions regarding the effect of interactions after meetings. Coordination theory expands current conceptualizations of workplace meetings by broadening the notion of meetings to cover a more extended period of interdependent interactions.

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 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.

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.

This research paper concentrates on the meeting design characteristic of meeting size in order to uncover how this impacts employee engagement and task performance within an organization. The results revealed that meetings viewed by employees as being effective does boost their engagement level at work. Furthermore small meeting sizes consisting of well-chosen participants transpired to be the most effective format for yielding improved end-of-the-day task performance in the participants. Managers are therefore advised to seek feedback on the relevance of their meeting invitations, and carefully consider who is likely to add value to a meeting.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine meetings as a form of meta-practice and investigate their role related to management control of innovation development.

This research draws on case studies of two biotechnology firms operating in pharmaceuticals and medicine, which represent different contexts regarding the uncertainty and complexity of innovation development.

The study suggests two distinct roles of meetings in the context of innovation development: meetings as regulating and ordering; and meetings as a resource. In the first role, meetings serve as a regulative mechanism that brings together multiple elements of control into a system. Meetings as a meta-practice regulate and order by bracketing elements of innovation in time and space, rendering the innovation process more manageable and allowing actors to handle the complexity of knowledge. In the second role, meetings are used as a resource, sporadically intervening in the ongoing activities of innovation projects. The study explains how these two roles relate to the uncertainty and complexity of innovation development and have different implications for management control.

The study challenges the instrumental view of meetings by taking a closer look at their structuring potential in the organization. Understanding the roles of meetings provides another perspective on the functioning of management control and opens new avenues for studying the practices of control and decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relative importance of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) based features and services at conference centers and underlying dimensions which could impact their selection by meeting planners. Further, it tests the relationship between types of meeting planners and their perceived importance of ICT‐based features.

A total of 17 ICT‐based features and services were identified through extensive literature content analysis. Meeting planners were asked to rate the importance of each item when they select a conference center. Factor analysis was then performed to identify underlying dimension of the items and ANOVA was used to test any difference of perceived importance by the type of meeting planners.

Meeting planners consider “availability of technical support”, “high‐speed internet”, “wireless connectivity”, and ”e‐mail station” as important features/service when they select a conference center. However, they show significant lack of knowledge in terms related to network infrastructure that are used in meeting venue marketing materials. The results show that there is no significant difference in their perceived importance of ICT‐based feature/service by the type of meeting planner.

This study provides meaningful new dimensions of important ICT‐based features and services in site selection by both researchers and meeting facility professionals. In addition, this study compared three types of meeting planners including rarely studied corporate and government meeting planners regarding their perceived importance of ICT‐based features and services in their site selection.

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.

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.

Annual general meetings have been variously described as dull rituals for accountability versus entertaining theatre at the expense of accountability. The research analyses director and shareholder participation and dialogic interactions at annual and extraordinary general meetings of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC). The BSAC was incorporated under a royal charter in 1889 in return for power to exploit a huge territory, Rhodesia/now Zimbabwe. The BSAC's administration ceased in 1924/25. Thus, the BSAC had a dual mandate as a private for-profit listed company and to occupy and develop the territories on behalf of the British government.

The article analyses 29 BSAC general meeting minutes, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim minutes between 1895 and 1925. The study adopts manual content analysis. First, the research adopts conversational analysis to analyse director and shareholder turn-taking and moves by approving and dissenting shareholders. Second, the study identifies and analyses incidents of shareholder sentiment from the shareholder turns/moves. Finally, the article assesses how shareholder sentiment changed throughout the period and whether the BSAC's share price reflected the shareholder sentiment.

The BSAC's general meetings were associated with the greater colonial project of building the British Empire. The authors find almost 1,500 incidents of shareholder sentiment. Directors and shareholders take roughly an equal number of turns (excluding shareholder sentiment). Ritual and ceremony dominate director and shareholder turns and moves, while accountability to shareholders was minimal. The BSAC share price spiked in the early years of the project, waning after that. Shareholder sentiment, both positive and negative, reflect the share price behaviour.

A unique database of verbatim general meeting minutes records shareholders' reactions to what they heard in the form of sounding off through cheering, “hear, hears,” laughter and applause (i.e. shareholder sentiment).