Abstract
Teams are an integral tool for collaboration and they are often embedded in a larger organization that has its own mission, values, and orientations. Specifically, organizations can be oriented toward a variety of values: learning, customer service, and even meetings. This paper explores a new and novel construct, organizational meeting orientation (the set of policies and procedures that promote or lead to meetings), and its relationship to perceived team meeting outcomes and work attitudes. An organization’s policies, procedures, and overall orientation toward the use of team meetings—along with the quality and perceived effectiveness of those meetings—set the stage for how teams develop and collaborate. Across two exploratory studies, we demonstrate that perceptions of an organization’s orientation toward meetings is associated with the perceived quality and satisfaction of team meetings, along with work engagement and intentions to quit. Employees who feel meetings lack purpose or are overused tend to be less engaged with their work and more likely to consider leaving the organization. Based on the findings, we conclude with a robust discussion of how meeting orientation may set the stage for team interactions, influencing how their team operates over time on a given project or series of projects. An organization’s orientation toward meetings is a new construct that may exert an influence on team dynamics at the organizational level, representing a factor of the organization that affects how and when teams meet and collaborate.
Highlights
Workplace meetings are essential to both the functioning of organizations and employees’ workplace experiences
Team Meeting Satisfaction Hypotheses 1a and 2a,b predicted that overuse would be negatively related to team meeting effectiveness, whereas policy focus, rewards, and strategic use of group and team meetings would be positively related to team meeting satisfaction
Hypothesis 1b predicted that overuse would be negatively related to team meeting effectiveness, and hypothesis 3a,c proposed that policy focus, rewards, and strategic use of meetings would be positively related to team meeting effectiveness
Summary
Workplace meetings are essential to both the functioning of organizations and employees’ workplace experiences. Of the estimated 55 million meetings occurring daily in the United States, managers in large organizations are dedicating over three-quarters of their time preparing for, attending, leading, and processing meeting results (Keith, 2015). Being that meetings are an integral part of organizations, firms may have a unique culture of policies, procedures, and practices that promote, emphasize, and result in meetings – that is, a meeting orientation (Hansen and Allen, 2015). Meeting orientation is a relatively unexplored topic in meeting science, and no empirical studies have looked at its relationship to employee attitudes concerning meetings or their broader work environments. An organization’s overall culture toward meetings (i.e., meeting orientation) may have important consequences for how groups and teams develop over time by, for instance, influencing how often, when, and under what circumstances group members come together to work and discuss problems
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