Exploring meeting science: Questions and answers

EXPLORING MEETING SCIENCE 21 of social action and interaction that allow workplace members to produce and reproduce a department’s, a team’s, and/or an organization’s vision, mission, and goals (Van Vree, 2011; Boden, 1994). Therefore, meeting science is the conceptual, intellectual, and practical activity used to systematically study what goes on before, during, and after a meeting. Meeting science is the study of the meetings themselves, their outcomes, and other meeting-related phenomena. Meeting science is naturally cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary. It unites researchers with diverse backgrounds and skillsets whose overarching goal is the same: to further the understanding of workplace meetings through rigorous scientific inquiry. Is meeting science new? Yes and no. The study of meetings as a focal and featured phenomenon in of itself is rather new. While Schwartzman (1989) called attention to the importance of meetings almost 30 years ago, only relatively recently have researchers began to focus on meetings as a direct object of inquiry (Rogelberg, Shanock, Scott, 2012). On the other hand, for decades small group and team researchers used meetings as a “container” for studying other phenomena of interest, such as decision-making, cohesion, group facilitation, group emotional processes, group development, and so on (e.g., Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer, & LaGanke, 2002; Gersick, 1988; Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998; Kauffeld & Meyers, 2009; Van de Ven & Delbecq, 1974). While these previous studies have certainly made important contributions to our understanding of small groups and teams, they did not—and likely did not intend to—advance the field of meeting science. The latter requires a focus on meetings as a research phenomenon in its own right. By using meetings as a mere context for other group phenomena, much of the past literature on meetings has largely ignored the importance of meetings as events in and of EXPLORING MEETING SCIENCE 22 themselves that shape work, the organization, and the individual. Meeting science addresses this important oversight. For example, Rogelberg and colleagues (2006) used an interruptions framework to understanding how meeting demands (e.g., number and hours per week) relate to employee attitudes. By studying meetings in this way, Rogelberg and colleagues determined that time in meetings interacts with employee interdependence, accomplishment striving, and meeting effectiveness to affect job satisfaction. Studying meetings as a phenomenon in of themselves opens up a host of important research questions that meeting scientists have only recently begun to investigate. What do meeting scientists do? Meeting scientists are united in their belief that meetings warrant rigorous scientific inquiry. Using their diverse backgrounds, meetings scientists pursue three core areas of inquiry: what goes into meetings, what takes place in meetings, and what occurs as a result of meetings. This framework allows meetings scientists to study a multitude of phenomena. For example, meetings can be explored as a cultural and sensemaking phenomenon (e.g., Schwartzman, 1986), as a power and influence phenomenon (e.g., Barge & Keyton, 1994), as an affective phenomenon (e.g., Lehmann-Willenbrock et al., 2011), and as a communication phenomenon (e.g., Chaney & Lyden, 1997). Meetings research naturally lends itself to interdisciplinary study, cutting across and integrating different disciplines. As such, meeting scientists come from a multitude of backgrounds. Often meetings research spurs collaboration between disciplinarily dissimilar scholars. For example, it is not uncommon for meetings research to be simultaneously investigated by scholars with backgrounds in business, industrial and organizational psychology, sociology, anthropology, and communications.