The Effectiveness Of Meetings

Effectiveness in meetings: An exploration of its drivers
Gelixue Yang(10226672)
Rong Ma(10226095)
Shanshan Li(10227172)
Xueqian Wang(10226176)

Abstract
Meetings dominate the way in which we do business today. Using empirical
information, this report aims at examining how group members’ mood, level of task
orientation, meeting size and feeling of participative safety influence groupmeeting as
well as the moderating effects of agenda. Our results show that mood, task orientation,
and participative safety are significant predictors of meeting effectiveness, with mood
and task orientation the most important. Meeting size, though not significant, has a
negative impact on meeting effectiveness. Agenda is not very helpful in influencing
meeting effectiveness.

IntroductionGroup meeting becomes increasingly important especially in project-oriented task.
It has been reported that executives spend approximately 10 hours per week in meetings
(Nixon & Littlepage, 1992) and that in the United States alone, perhaps a million
meetings are going on at any given hour during the business day( Napier& Gershenfeld,
1987, p418). Studies showed that well-organized group meetingcontributed to overall

success of group performance. It is necessary for a team to build such a forum on which
group members are able to share their opinions freely towards the work undertook.
However, it is not uncommon to see that people do not always enjoy the process of
group meeting. Low group participation, free riders, a bad decision-making process, and
failure to hold a group’sattention are some symptoms of a bad meeting.(Garcia, Kunz,
& Fischer, 2004)
Although some studies have identified a bunch of factors, such as meeting size,
mood of participants, punctuality, participative safety, which will influence group
productivity, few of them presented the mechanism among these factors. In another
word, it is still unclear how these factors affect final group performanceand whether
there exist some moderators which can strengthen or weaken their influences towards
meeting productivity. Other meeting literatures consist primarily of observations,
opinions, and suggestions concerning how to run more effective meetings.(Beaudin &
Williams, 1990)

However, most of suggestions offered by these researches are just

based on theories or experiences and are nottested empirically.
Using empirical information, this report aims at examining the impacts of some
group meeting factors on meeting productivity, more specifically, what influence
brought by group members’ mood, level of task orientation, meeting size and feeling of
participative safety in group meeting. To deepen the knowledge of this field, this study
also invested the moderating effects ofagenda in the relationships mentioned above.
Therefore, our research questions are:
Q1: What factors influence meeting effectiveness?

Q2: What is the relationship between meeting effectiveness and the factors mood,
meeting size, task orientation and participative safety?
Q3: Does agenda moderate the relationship between meeting effectiveness and the
factors (mood, meeting size, taskorientation and participative safety)?
Conceptual model
Our conceptual model is as follows:

mood

participative safety

meeting size

task orientation

+

+

agenda

-

meeting
effectiveness

+

Figure 1. Conceptual model
Theoretical support and hypotheses
1) Dependent variable
Meeting effectiveness
We define meeting effectiveness as the capability of creating satisfactionof
employees by providing them useful information.
2) Independent variables:
Mood

We define mood as a state or quality of feeling at a particular time. Obviously
when people lose their interests towards a topic, it’s barely for them to contribute to the
discussion effectively. This should be prevented since negative mood will do harm to
the effectiveness of a meeting. So we assume...