Prelims

Half Title

Managing Meetings in Organizations

Research on Managing Groups and Teams

Edited by Marshall Scott Poole, on behalf of the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup)

Previous Volumes:

Series Editor: Eduardo Salas

Research on Managing Groups and Teams  Volume 20

Title Page

Managing Meetings in Organizations

Edited by

Annika L. Meinecke

Department of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany

Joseph A. Allen

Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, University of Utah Health, USA

Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock

Department of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, University of Hamburg, Germany

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2020

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ISBN: 978-1-83867-228-7 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-227-0 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-229-4 (Epub)

ISN: 1534-0856 (Series)

Contents

About the Contributors

Joseph A. Allen is a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Utah. He holds a PhD from University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research interests include workplace meetings, volunteer management, and occupational health and safety. Publication outlets include Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Group & Organization Management.

Anita L. Blanchard is an Associate Professor of Psychological Science and Organization Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is interested in how feelings of group and community develop on-line, particularly the social and technological components that affect entitativity perceptions.

Dorothy R. Carter, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia. Her research investigates the factors that enable leaders, teams, and larger interdependent systems to tackle complex challenges in contexts including the military, scientific research, corporations, and space exploration.

Ming Ming Chiu is Professor of Analytics and Diversity (Honor) at The Education University of Hong Kong. He is a graduate of Columbia (BS, Computer Science), Harvard (EdM, Interactive Technology), and University of California – Berkeley (PhD, Education). He studies automatic statistical analyses, inequalities, culture, and learning in 65 countries.

Ulrike Fasbender is Assistant Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen in Germany. She holds a PhD from Leuphana University. Her research on career development, transition to retirement, diversity management, and intergroup relations has been published in Personnel Psychology, Human Relations, and Journal of Vocational Behavior, among others.

Michelle L. Flynn is a Doctoral candidate in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program at Clemson University under Dr Marissa L. Shuffler. Her research investigates leadership, team dynamics, and larger systems that operate in complex environments. Moreover, her research aims to develop novel measurement tools to unobtrusively capture team processes across varying contexts.

Fabiola H. Gerpott holds the Chair for Management with an emphasis on Leadership at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management. Her research focuses on the communicative basis of leadership and the micro-dynamics of organizational learning processes. She holds a PhD from Jacobs University Bremen and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Clara S. Hemshorn de Sánchez is a Doctoral student at the Department of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Hamburg. She holds a Master degree from the University of Leiden. Her research interests lie in processes of social influence in teams as well as the role that gender takes in this context.

Simone Kauffeld is a Professor of Industrial/Organizational and Social Psychology at the TU Braunschweig. She received her PhD from the University of Kassel, Germany. Her research focuses on various aspects concerning competences, team and leadership, career and coaching, and organization development and work design.

John E. Kello is a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Davidson College. He earned a PhD from Duke University. His professional interest focuses on the high performance organization model and the application of the strategies of team-based “work redesign” and behavior-based safety in a variety of work settings.

Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock is a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Hamburg. She holds a PhD from TU Braunschweig. Her research on interaction patterns, temporal team processes, and leader–follower dynamics has been published in Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Organizational Behavior, among others.

Salvatore Leone is MD/PhD student in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He received his BS in Psychology at Creighton University. His research focuses on the role of core processes of creativity in team settings.

Svea Lübstorf is a recent graduate from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, with a Master’s degree in Psychology and is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in industrial/organizational psychology at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests include occupational health in teams and observational research methods in field settings.

Andrew McBride is a PhD student in Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received his BA in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research interests include diversity in groups, workplace meetings, and employee voice.

Annika L. Meinecke is a Postdoc at the Department of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Hamburg. She holds a PhD from TU Braunschweig. Her research focuses on leader–follower dynamics, team processes, and interaction analysis and has been published in Journal of Applied Psychology and The Leadership Quarterly, among others.

Joseph E. Mroz is a PhD candidate in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha set to graduate in December 2019. He currently works as a Research Consultant at Denison Consulting. His research interests include workplace meetings, organizational culture, and interpersonal reactions to behavioral transgressions.

Vignesh Murugavel is a graduate student pursuing an MA/PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has a BS in Psychology from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is interested in research on idea evaluation and the creative process.

Friederike Redlbacher is a PhD candidate at the Chair of Organization and Management at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on governing effects of meeting landscapes, which she explores through case studies. Additional research interests include innovative and emergent forms of organizing and strategies used in public and private organizations.

Roni Reiter-Palmon is a Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She received her PhD from George Mason University. Her research focuses on creativity and innovation in the workplace, cognitive processes and individual difference variables that influence creative performance, and organizational adoption of innovative processes.

Emanuel Schreiner is a Researcher, Educator, and Management Trainer. He works at the Technical University of Munich as Senior Manager for Leadership Research and Development in its Center for Digital Leadership Development. His research, teaching, and consulting activities focus on leadership and leadership development, teamwork, and creativity and innovation.

Marissa L. Shuffler, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Clemson University. Her research is aimed at deriving scientifically based, innovative interventions to develop, sustain, and maximize inter- and intrateam functioning and well-being. Currently, her published work includes an edited book, over 60 scholarly publications, and over 175 presentations.

Jordan G. Smith is a second-year Doctoral student in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology program at Clemson University under Dr Marissa Shuffler. She is interested in team dynamics and psychological safety among multiteam systems in high-stress work environments.

Julia Straube is a Doctoral candidate at the Department of Industrial/Organizational and Social Psychology at the TU Braunschweig, Germany. She holds a Master degree from the University of Heidelberg. Her research focuses on communication processes in diverse teams and specifically the role of faultlines.

Amanda L. Thayer, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Akron. Her research seeks to facilitate team and system effectiveness through team composition and improving teamwork dynamics, across a variety of contexts including military, space, entrepreneurial start-ups, and non-profit organizations.

Mark van Vugt is a Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, Work and Organizational Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds a PhD from the University of Maastricht and is interested in how evolutionary theory can be applied to understand group dynamics, organizational behavior, leadership, conflict and cooperation, and intergroup relations.

Preface

“Meetings, meetings, meetings … too many, too often, too long”: a common refrain and complaint in today’s organizations. Yet as much time as people spend in meetings and as many critical decisions and errors are made in meetings, it is surprising how little reflection and thought is devoted to the subject. Perhaps it is because we attend so many meetings we think we know all about them. As Fletcher (1984) has commented:

It is, when you think about it, astonishing how cocksure most of us are about meetings. We treat them – as we would never treat tennis, golf, or horse-riding, let alone accountancy or computer programming – as though they can be mastered without training or guidance, or even much forethought (p. 13).

In Managing Meetings in Organizations Meinecke, Allen, and Lehmann-Willenbrock have assembled a set of chapters that provides this much needed reflection on meetings, their problems, their challenges, and what can be done to make them more effective. This volume includes chapters about a wide range of subjects related to meetings, some of which address well-known issues and others which break new ground.

After introducing conceptual foundations for the study of meetings, the volume considers the impact of meetings on individuals and the team itself. The importance of reflexivity in fostering effective meetings and enabling meetings is explored in depth. Attention then turns to the dynamics of gender and diversity in meetings, a topic much in need of exploration. The development of divisions and faultlines in meetings is a serious issue, and two excellent chapters consider the effects of faultlines and how they can be prevented or dissolved. The final section of the book focuses on leadership and strategy in meetings.

Managing Meetings in Organizations makes an important contribution to our understanding of this elemental social form. Meetings will always be with us in modern society, and explaining and improving them is a great contribution to organizational effectiveness.

This is the first volume of the Research on Managing Groups and Teams series that has been issued under the sponsorship of INGRoup, the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research. I am proud to have this as our inaugural volume.

Marshall Scott Poole

Series Editor

Further reading

Fletcher, W. (1984). Meetings, meetings: How to manipulate them and make them more fun. New York, NY: William Morrow.

Foreword

While I don’t love attending meetings, I do love studying them. And so do many, many others. Research on the topic of workplace meetings is exploding at an incredible rate. The work spans disciplines and spans the globe. A book like this allows us to stop, breathe, and get a good sense of where we are and where we need to go. I am grateful to the authors for taking on this meaningful effort.

This book does an excellent job highlighting the evolutionary origins of meetings and the different types of meetings that we encounter in contemporary organizations. The book then proceeds to capturing and discussing individual (specifically well-being) and team processes in meetings (including the role of entitativity and team reflexivity in meetings) before delving into the topic of diversity and gender in meetings. The book closes with three book chapters that shed new light on leadership and strategy processes that emerge in and through meetings. I also really appreciate that the different book chapters each lay out an agenda for research that can be incredibly helpful.

Meeting science is clearly evolving and maturing. I am excited to see meeting science finding its footing and establishing a nice balance of primary studies, evidence-based practice pieces designed to improve the current state of meetings at work, and integrative book efforts like this. Thank you to the authors for their excellent work and being such good stewards of meeting science.

Sincerely,

Steven Rogelberg

Chancellor’s Professor

Professor, Psychology, Management, and Organizational Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGRoup), and especially to the series editor Marshall Scott Poole, for providing us with the opportunity to edit this volume. A key mission of INGRoup is to unite scholars who study groups and teams across fields and nations, and its annual conference provides an opportunity to network and socialize. It was at one of these conferences that the editors of this volume got to meet for the first time.

Accordingly, we were excited to bring together this international and interdisciplinary group of authors – ranging from early career researchers to established scholars in meeting science. Research on workplace meetings is growing thanks to the wonderful scholars who devote their time and energy to studying this intriguing – though in practice, sometimes despised – workplace phenomenon. We are grateful to the authors who contributed to this volume for their hard work.

We hope that those who share our enthusiasm for meetings will gain something meaningful from reading this book, be it an inspiration for their own research or actionable advice for an improved next meeting.

Annika L. Meinecke, Joseph A. Allen, and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock

Volume Editors