Psychology Commons^™

To Excuse Or Not To Excuse: Effect Of Explanation Type And Provision On Reactions To A Workplace Behavioral Transgression, Joseph Mroz

Psychology Faculty Publications

People often offer an excuse or an apology after they do something wrong. In this paper, we examine how giving an excuse, an apology, or no explanation after arriving late to a meeting influences the attitudes and behavioral intentions others form toward the late arrival. Additionally, we examined how a group-related factor (complaining) and the late arrival’s history with coming late affected participant judgments. Across two studies using complementary experimental and survey methods, we found that an excuse is better than no explanation, but that the difference between apology and no explanation and apology and excuse is not always clear. …

Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science Of Workplace Meetings, Joseph Mroz, Joseph A. Allen, Dana C. Verhoeven, Marissa L. Shuffler

Psychology Faculty Publications

Meetings are routine in organizations, but their value is often questioned by the employees who must sit through them daily. The science of meetings that has emerged as of late provides necessary direction toward improving meetings, but an evaluation of the current state of the science is much needed. In this review, we examine current directions for the psychological science of workplace meetings, with a focus on applying scientific findings about the activities that occur before, during, and after meetings that facilitate success. We conclude with concrete recommendations and a checklist for promoting good meetings, as well as some thoughts …

Leadership In Workplace Meetings: The Intersection Of Leadership Styles And Follower Gender, Joseph R. Mroz, Michael Yoerger, Joseph A. Allen

Psychology Faculty Publications

Meetings are ubiquitous across organizations, yet researchers have paid scant attention to the role of meeting leaders in affecting meeting outcomes. Because meetings are important discursive sites, the style of a meeting leader may influence subordinate views of the meeting and leader. Using a sample of working adults, we first demonstrated that meeting attendees who perceived their leader as participative viewed the leader as more warm and competent than meeting attendees who had a directive leader. We explain this finding through the framework of social exchange theory. In Study 2, we conducted an experiment to further probe the relation between …

The Impact Of Premeeting Talk On Group Performance, Michael Yoerger, Joseph A. Allen, John Crowe

Psychology Faculty Publications

Interactions that occur prior to a meeting constitute premeeting talk (PMT). Of the different PMT types, research suggests that small talk PMT is especially meaningful. In this study, meeting participants’ interactions both prior to and during the meeting were video recorded, coded into sense units, and classified by coding schemes. This study investigated the influence of small talk PMT on both perceived and objective group performances, as well as the potential for positive socioemotional and problem-focused statements to serve as mediators. The results supported the mediating influence of both types of statements for only perceived performance. Our results suggest that …

Regulating Emotions In Response To Power Distance In Meetings, Rebekka Erks, Erin Nyquist, Joseph A. Allen

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose – Meetings are a necessary part of work. This research focuses on how power distance in meetings affects emotional labour, including whether leader-member exchange (LMX) serves as a moderator for this relationship. It is hypothesized that power distance in meetings would lead to higher levels of emotional labour in meeting attendees, and that higher levels of LMX would make this relationship even stronger.

Design/methodology/approach - The authors used a panel sample of full-time working adults from a variety of industries who regularly attend meetings. Participants completed a survey with items related to power distance, emotional labour, and LMX. Hypotheses …

Faking It For The Higher-Ups: Status And Surface Acting In Workplace Meetings, Jane Shumski Thomas, Jessie Olien, Joseph A. Allen, Steven G. Rogelberg, John Kello

Psychology Faculty Publications

Recent evidence suggests that surface acting occurs in workplace meetings. Even in light of these findings, it remains unknown why employees would choose to surface act in meetings with their colleagues and supervisors, and how this form of emotion regulation affects employees in the short-term. A sample of working adults were asked to report their levels of surface acting during multiple workplace meetings. Results indicate that employees engage in surface acting during meetings, and that their surface acting is positively related to the presence of higher-status attendees in these meetings. Additionally, surface acting during meetings is negatively related to perceptions …

Meeting Madness: Counterproductive Meeting Behaviors And Personality Traits, Michael Yoerger, Johanna Jones, Joseph A. Allen, John Crowe

Psychology Faculty Publications

When used effectively, workplace meetings serve as an invaluable opportunity for coworkers to achieve organizational objectives. However, meetings are often regarded as inefficient, unproductive, and a waste of time. Due to meeting attendee frustration, there can be detrimental impact on employee wellbeing. In this paper, we examine the impact of a specific type of meeting behavior, counterproductive meeting behaviors (CMBs), which include non-constructive criticism and complaints on perceptions of meeting effectiveness. Additionally, we explore the potential moderating influence of personality characteristics on this relationship. While meeting leaders may take great efforts in designing meetings based on good meeting practices supported …

Meetings As A Positive Boost? How And When Meeting Satisfaction Impacts Employee Empowerment, Joseph A. Allen, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Stephanie Sands

Psychology Faculty Publications

Meetings constitute an important context for understanding organizational behavior and employee attitudes. Employees spend ever-increasing time in meetings and often complain about their meetings. In contrast, we explore the positive side of meetings and argue that satisfying meetings can empower rather than deplete individual employees. We gathered time-lagged data from an online sample of working adults in the U.S. As hypothesized, meeting satisfaction predicted employee empowerment, and information availability partially mediated this effect. Moreover, we found that these effects were stronger when employees participated in more meetings: Meeting demands moderated the link between meeting satisfaction and information availability as well …

Quantity And Quality: Increasing Safety Norms Through After Action Reviews, Alexandra M. Dunn, Cliff Scott, Joseph A. Allen, Daniel L. Bonilla

Psychology Faculty Publications

Workplace safety is a concern for both scholars and practitioners alike because accidents and injuries can result in time away from work and lost organizational resources. This study focuses on how one type of post-incident discussion can be effectively used to promote positive safety norms. It adds to the growing body of research on after action review meetings, one type of post-incident discussion intervention commonly used in high reliability organizations to increase future workplace safety behaviors. This study also extends the sensemaking and high reliability literatures by examining a three-way interaction between perceived frequency of after action review meetings, ambiguity …

Our Love/Hate Relationship With Meetings: Relating Good And Bad Meeting Behaviors To Meeting Outcomes, Engagement, And Exhaustion, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Joseph A. Allen, Dain Belyeu

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose

Employees at all organizational levels spend large portions of their work lives in meetings, many of which are not effective. Previous process-analytical research has identified counterproductive communication patterns to help explain why many meetings go wrong. This study aims to illustrate the ways in which counterproductive – and productive – meeting behaviors are related to individual work engagement and emotional exhaustion.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors built a new research-based survey tool for measuring counterproductive meeting behaviors. An online sample of working adults (N = 440) was recruited to test the factor structure of this new survey and to examine …

Übernehmen Sie Die Kontrolle! Gutes Besprechungsmanagement Fängt Mit Der Einberufung Eines Meetings An, Joseph A. Allen, Martin J. Eppler

Psychology Faculty Publications

Arbeitsbesprechungen zu hassen, ist à la mode. Der US-amerikanische Sitzungsforscher Joseph A. Allen von der University of Nebraska rät allerdings, auch den nächsten Schritt zu gehen und die Dinge konsequent in die Hand zu nehmen. Ein Gespräch über die Frage, wie man eine Sitzung auf Kurs hält.

Participate Or Else!: The Effect Of Participation In Decision-Making In Meetings On Employee Engagement, Michael Yoerger, John Crowe, Joseph A. Allen

Psychology Faculty Publications

In the scope of organizational life, few events are as universal or as influential as workplace meetings. In this study, we focused our attention on better understanding the relationship between meetings processes and post-meeting outcomes. More specifically, we investigated the relationship between participation in decision-making in meetings (PDM) and employee engagement, after controlling for the impact of meeting size and other demographic variables. We examined this from a theoretical perspective, providing particular consideration to the underlying basis of social exchange theory and norms of reciprocity at work in this relationship. Using a sample of working adults in the United States …

Linking Pre-Meeting Communication To Meeting Effectiveness, Joseph A. Allen, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nicole Landowski

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose – This study investigates the importance of communication that occurs just before workplace meetings (i.e., pre-meeting talk). We explore how four specific types of pre-meeting talk (small talk, work talk, meeting preparatory talk, and shop talk) impact participants' experiences of meeting effectiveness. Moreover, we investigate the role of participants’ personality in the link between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness.

Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained using an online survey of working adults (N = 252). Because pre-meeting talk has not been studied previously, a new survey measure of meeting talk was developed.

Findings – Pre-meeting small talk was a …

Naturalistic Decision Making In After-Action Review Meetings: The Implementation Of And Learning From Post- Fall Huddles, Roni Reiter-Palmon, Victoria Kennel, Joseph A. Allen, Katherine J. Jones, Anne M. Skinner

Psychology Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to add to our understanding of naturalistic decision making (NDM) in health care and how after-action reviews (AARs) can be utilized as a learning tool to reduce errors. The study focused on the implementation of a specific form of AAR, a post-fall huddle, to learn from errors and reduce patient falls. Utilizing 17 hospitals that participated in this effort, information was collected on 226 falls over a period of 16 months. The findings suggested that the use of self-guided post-fall huddles increased over the time of the project, indicating adoption of the process. Additionally, …

Understanding Workplace Meetings: A Qualitative Taxonomy Of Meeting Purposes, Joseph A. Allen, Tammy Beck, Cliff Scott, Steven G. Rogelberg

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose - Meetings are a workplace activity that deserves increased attention from researchers and practitioners. Previous researchers attempted to develop typologies of meeting purpose with limited success. Through a comparison of classification methodologies, we consider a taxonomy as the appropriate classification scheme for meeting purpose. The goal of our study is to propose a taxonomy of meeting purpose. We then utilize the developed taxonomy to investigate the frequency with which a representative sample of working adults engaged in meetings of these varying purposes. Our proposed taxonomy provides relevant classifications for future research on meetings and serves as a useful tool …

Less Acting, More Doing: How Surface Acting Relates To Perceived Meeting Effectiveness And Other Employee Outcomes, Linda R. Shanock, Joseph A. Allen, Alexandra M. Dunn, Benjamin E. Baran, Cliff W. Scott, Steven G. Rogelberg

Psychology Faculty Publications

This study adds to the growing body of research on work meetings and extends the emotional labour literature beyond a service context by examining the relationship between surface acting during meetings and perceived meeting effectiveness. Additionally, the relationships of surface acting during meetings and perceived meeting effectiveness with time-lagged reports of intention to quit and emotional exhaustion 3 months later were investigated. Structural equation modelling of data from 178 working adults revealed negative relationships between surface acting and perceptions of meeting effectiveness. Perceived meeting effectiveness partially mediated the relationship between surface acting and both intention to quit and emotional exhaustion …

Observing Culture: Differences In U.S.-American And German Team Meeting Behaviors, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Joseph A. Allen, Annika L. Meinecke

Psychology Faculty Publications

Although previous research has theorized about team interaction differences between the German and U.S. cultures, actual behavioral observations of such differences are sparse. This study explores team meetings as a context for examining intercultural differences. We analyzed a total of 5,188 meeting behaviors in German and U.S. student teams. All teams discussed the same task to consensus. Results from behavioral process analyses showed that German teams focused significantly more on problem analysis, whereas U.S. teams focused more on solution production. Moreover, U.S. teams showed significantly more positive socioemotional meeting behavior than German teams. Finally, German teams showed significantly more counteractive …

What Happens Before A Meeting? – Small Talk Steigert Die Meetingeffektivität, Joseph A. Allen, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock

Psychology Faculty Publications

Research question: We explore how pre-meeting small talk impacts meeting effectiveness through the” ripple effect”, allowing before meeting communication/behaviors to ripple into and impact the scheduled meeting.

Methodology: Data was obtained using an online survey of working adults (N = 252). A new survey measure of meeting talk was developed.

Practical implications: Managers should encourage their employees to arrive in time so that they can engage in pre-meeting talk. Small talk before a scheduled meeting can have beneficial effects for the effectiveness of the meeting.

Employees’ Feelings About More Meetings: An Overt Analysis And Recommendations For Improving Meetings, Joseph A. Allen, Stephanie J. Sands, Stephanie L. Mueller, Katherine A. Frear, Mara Mudd, Steven G. Rogelberg

Psychology Faculty Publications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify how employees feel about having more meetings and what can be done to improve employees’ feelings about their work meetings.

Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from three samples of working adults. The first was a convenience sample recruited by undergraduate students (n = 120), the second was a stratified random sample from a metropolitan area in the southern USA (n = 126), and the third was an internet-based panel sample (n = 402). Constant comparative analysis of responses to open-ended questions was used to investigate the overarching research questions.

Findings …

Mind Your Meetings: Improve Your Organization’S Effectiveness One Meeting At A Time, Joseph A. Allen, Steven G. Rogelberg, John C. Scott

Psychology Faculty Publications

Managers and executives spend an inordinate amount of time in the estimated 11 million meetings held in the United States every day. In a survey of 1,900 business leaders, 72% indicated they spend more time in meetings today than they did five years ago, and 49% said they expect that time in meetings to increase.

Another study revealed that small businesses (fewer than 10 people) spend about 10% of their time preparing, attending, leading and concluding meetings. Larger organizations (500 or more employees) spend about 75% of their work time on these activities.

As the number of meetings increases, the …