Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees.

Abstract

Meetings are an integral part of organizational life; however, few empirical studies have systematically examined the phenomenon and its effects on employees. By likening work meetings to interruptions and daily hassles, the authors proposed that meeting load (i.e., frequency and time spent) can affect employee well-being. For a period of 1 week, participants maintained daily work diaries of their meetings as well as daily self-reports of their well-being. Using hierarchical linear modeling analyses, the authors found a significant positive relationship between number of meetings attended and daily fatigue as well as subjective workload (i.e., more meetings were associated with increased feelings of fatigue and workload).Meetings are an integral and pervasive experience of organizational life. As a forum in which employees communicate and coordinate the organization's goals and objectives, the meeting is a vehicle for many activities, from problem solving to interdepartmental interactions. Given their utility, it is not surprising that meeting load (i.e., the frequency and length of meetings) has steadily surged in the last few decades (Mosvick & Nelson, 1987). Since a 1973 study by Mintzberg, which found that the majority of a manager's typical workday (69%) was spent in meetings, more recent surveys have suggested that meeting loads are increasing. Mosvick and Nelson (1987), for example, reported that relative to the 1960s, the average executive participated in twice as many meetings in the 1980s. Tobia and Becker (1990), in a survey of 1,900 business leaders, found that almost 72% of individuals currently spend more time in meetings than they did 5 years ago. In addition, more than 49% surveyed expect to be spending even more time in meetings 4 years from now.Given these statistics indicating the rise in frequency of and time spent in meetings, it behooves us to ask whether increased meeting load is indeed beneficial for the organization and the individual employee. To the extent that meetings help organizations and employees achieve their goals, their utility is quite apparent. The question remains, however, as to whether an ever-increasing meeting load may affect the employee at the individual, psychological level. In our search of the extant literature, we found no research that addresses the psychological effects of meeting load; in fact, we found that few empirical studies have been conducted on the phenomenon of the meeting itself. In taking heed of Schwartzman's (1986) declaration to examine the meeting as a topic in its own right, with the present study we attempt to contribute to research by examining the meeting load of a sample of employees and how it affects how these employees feel at the end of each day, for 5 days.We propose that despite the fact that meetings may help achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings per day may have negative effects on the individual. In other words, we fully acknowledge the work-related benefits and the utility of me...

Predictors and Consequences of Daily Goal Adaptation

“…Subjective productivity was measured with a four-item scale developed by Luong and Rogelberg (2005). The items are "I was productive today," "I accomplished a lot at work today," "I have the impression that I wasted a great part of the day" (negatively scored), "The time I worked today was spent in a useful way.…”

Meetings as Persistent Conversations that use ICTs and Face-to-Face to Build Social Capital

“…Bonding social capital is also higher when people have been members for a longer time. While perceived overload might be present during a discrete FtF meeting or if people attend many meetings [26], our findings suggest that this effect is no longer significant when the conversations are spread out and extended beyond the discrete meeting context. This could be a helpful finding because despite a large body of research on information overload [41], no one has explored how relationshipbuilding information overload occurs or if it occurs at all.…”

“…The second form of social capital, bridging, refers to the type of resources and benefits that individuals experience based on their "weak or latent ties," such as acquaintances. The concept of weak ties originated with Granovetter [26] and his subsequent work that demonstrated how people, more loosely connected, share less redundant and more beneficial information. Thus, bridging social capital enables individuals to gain new, diverse perspectives from ties that do not form as part of their usual, inner circle of contacts [8].…”

“…Meeting load is also an important predictor of meeting satisfaction [26]. Since people often join voluntary membership organizations to meet their leisure and interest needs [4], people attending many meetings will likely have a different perception of information load than individuals attending few meetings [26], so we include this variable in our model. Together, these variables serve as conceptual measures of individual engagement; something that should affect relationships and thus social capital.…”

“…Interactions between members can cultivate relationships that can be identified as (a) strong tiesdefined as close, supportive, and trusting relationships [7]-that lead to bonding social capital, and (b) weak ties-more distant relationships [26]-that lead to bridging social capital [8].…”