A New Model for Respected Meetings

Abstract

Meetings play a very important role in organizations as it is through meetings that issues are resolved, decisions are made, and voices are heard. During meetings, people need to interact and exchange views before coming to a certain decision. Therefore, it is important for those organizing and attending meetings to be able to show respect to each other and so respect the decision outcomes. This study investigates the parameters for members of an organization to respect the decisions made in meetings. It gathers information from previous studies to be used to create the dimensions that helped to develop the questionnaire. The theoretical background applied encompass the Islamic theory of mutual consultations. The research setting is based on education institutions located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq while the attendees of the meetings comprise 200 participants from private education institutions of Gulen Movement in the region. Their responses were analyzed through the IBM SPSS and IBM AMOS Software. Results showed that mutual consultation in Islam is divided into three periods as pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post meeting and it was observed that pre-meeting procedures (intention and competence) directly effect in-meeting procedures (patience, responsibility, and coherence) and consequently in-meeting procedures have direct impact on the post-meeting procedures (respect to meeting decisions). Further, pre-meeting and in-meeting procedures explained 63.5 percent of overall variance on respect to meeting decisions. This study contributes to the practical and theoretical knowledge of meetings literature whereby practitioners can use the outcome to design better meetings which are also respected by the attendees.