Culture-driven scripts for meetings: An integrative theoretical lens for studying workplace meetings

Abstract

The current research conceptualizes workplace meetings as socially embedded forms of organizing and proposes that cross-cultural comparisons of workplace meetings offer insights into differences in meeting structures and processes. This provides a deeper understanding of how meetings drive organizing in different cultural settings. Specifically, we build programmatic theory proposing cognitive and behavioral scripts as a promising theoretical lens through which to capture and integrate sociocultural influences on workplace meetings. We adapt Cramton et al.'s (2021) cultural coordination scripts formulation (consisting of the task setting, role structure, temporal structure, and cues) to develop an interpretive framework for workplace meeting processes that orients future research on cross-cultural meetings. We further integrate existing research on cross-cultural meeting differences to develop a generic prototype meeting script and two illustrative examples of culturally specific meeting scripts (for German and U.S.-American meetings) to demonstrate the practical usefulness and usability of this programmatic theory.