The Ties of Meeting Leaders: A Social Network Analysis

Nils Christian Sauer,Simone Kauffeld

doi:10.4236/psych.2015.64039

Abstract

This study extends meeting research by applying social network analysis to meeting leaders’ behavior in actual, videotaped meetings (N = 46) and examining the position of meeting leaders in the meeting network. Analyses reveal that meeting leaders are key players in meetings taking on the roles of central actor, broker, and elicitor. The role of central actor is linked to the number of planned actions during the meeting whereas the role of elicitor is associated with participants’ satisfaction with the meeting leader and team productivity after the meeting. Our study highlights the different roles meeting leaders need to juggle to run meetings effectively.

Highlights

Meetings are an important part of organizational life and used for a wide array of purposes (Cohen, Rogelberg, Allen, & Luong, 2011)
We provide an overview of research on meeting leadership and social network analysis as a basis for our hypotheses
We examined the meeting leader’s position in the meeting network to answer the following questions: Does the meeting leader occupy a central position in the team meeting? Does the meeting leader encourage interaction between the team members? Does the meeting leader elicit contributions from the team members? Does occupying a central position, encouraging interchange, and eliciting contributions have a positive effect on meeting effectiveness and team performance?

Summary

Introduction

Meetings are an important part of organizational life and used for a wide array of purposes (Cohen, Rogelberg, Allen, & Luong, 2011). They are labor intensive and require the commitment of resources (Perkins, 2009). Each hour spent in a meeting means less time for actual productive work (Leach, Rogelberg, Warr, & Burnfield, 2009). Meetings remain a rarely studied facet of organizational behavior (Perkins, 2009; Rogelberg, Leach, Warr, & Burnfield, 2006). Questions remain about the factors that influence meeting effectiveness

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion