Meetings are salient sites of temporal behaviour in organizations. They consume large amounts of time, punctuate and interrupt the temporal flow of work, provide venues of time coordination and allocation, and mark time in organizations (e.g., the weekly staff meeting). In this article, we seek to answer the question, ''Should organizational scientists and temporality scholars care about meeting lateness?'' Across two studies, we find that meeting lateness is a high base rate and seemingly consequential workplace event, with both objective and subjective elements, and potential implications for individuals, relationships, groups, and the organization more broadly. Meeting lateness correlates include job satisfaction, intent to quit, satisfaction with meetings in general, age, and conscientiousness. In light of the frequency, consequences, and conceptual complexity of meeting lateness, along with the dearth of extant research on the topic, it is a phenomenon primed for further study.
Recent evidence suggests that surface acting occurs in workplace meetings. Even in light of these findings, it remains unknown why employees would choose to surface act in meetings with their colleagues and supervisors, and how this form of emotion regulation affects employees in the short term. A sample of working adults were asked to report their levels of surface acting during multiple workplace meetings. Results indicate that employees engage in surface acting during meetings, and that their surface acting is positively related to the presence of higher status attendees in these meetings. In addition, surface acting during meetings is negatively related to perceptions of both meeting psychological safety and meeting effectiveness. We also highlight the important role of one's job level as a moderating condition when examining the relationship between surface acting and perceived meeting effectiveness. Our results suggest that individuals who are higher up in an organization's hierarchy may perceive meetings as less effective when they surface act when compared with individuals who are in lower levels of the organization.
As a relatively new field of scientific study, many questions persist regarding meeting science. For example, what meetings science is, who meeting scientists are, and what distinguishes meeting science from other related fields of inquiry. The purpose of this chapter is to address these commonly asked questions. In this chapter we review what meeting science is, discuss the nascent nature of the field, describe who meeting scientists are and what they do, and disentangle the relationship between meeting science and team science. To close, we outline directions for future meetings research.
Leading meetings represent a typically and frequently performed leadership task. This study investigated the relationship between the leadership style of supervisors and employees' perception of meeting outcomes. Results showed that participants reported greater meeting satisfaction when their meeting leader was assessed as a considerate supervisor, with the relationship between considerate leadership style and meeting satisfaction being mediated by both relational-and task-oriented meeting procedures. The results, however, provide no support for initiating structure being associated with meeting effectiveness measures. More generally, the findings imply that leadership behavior is a crucial factor in explaining important meeting outcomes.
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