مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Meetings are an important context for understanding organizational behavior and employee attitudes. They provide a window into social dynamics in the workplace (Meinecke & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2015) and take up substantial work time for employees of contemporary organizations: a typical employee spends about 6 h per week in scheduled meetings (Rogelberg, Leach, Warr, & Burnfield, 2006). Meetings are de- fined as work-related interactions between three or more people that have purpose and structure; they are usually scheduled in advance, last between 30 and 60 min, and can be conducted face to face as well as virtually (Schwartzman, 1986; Rogelberg et al., 2006). Employees’ behaviors and experiences in meetings can affect many different aspects of their jobs and also influence the general success of an organization (e.g., Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012; Rogelberg, Allen, Shanock, Scott, & Shuffler, 2010). Unfortunately, meetings can be a nuisance rather than a site for productive collaboration, and employees evaluate almost half of their meetings as ineffective (Lehmann-Willenbrock, Allen, & Belyeu, in press; Schell, 2010). In addition to wasting time and money, bad meetings negatively impact employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, co-worker trust, and other job attitudes as well as well-being (Luong & Rogelberg, 2005; Rogelberg et al., 2006, 2010; Allen, Yoerger, Lehmann-Willenbrock, & Jones, 2015).

In this paper, we depart from this negative view and highlight the positive sides of workplace meetings. Instead of viewing meetings as hassles or interruptions at work, we argue that meetings can function as sensemaking episodes. Sensemaking in organizations occurs through interpersonal communication, for example when employees discuss a problem, develop solutions, and identify necessary action steps (e.g., Maitlis, 2006; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Such sensemaking activities are typically observed behaviors in many organizational meetings (cf. Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012). Recent theorizing suggests that sensemaking in meetings occurs because meetings are often called in an effort to share information, reduce ambiguity, and promote collaboration (Scott, Allen, & Rogelberg, 2015). As such, meetings can create a work context that can be conducive to employee empowerment.

Empowerment refers to a cognitive orientation toward an employee’s own work role that is typically characterized by an individual’s perceived sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact (Spreitzer, 1995). Although research on empowerment initially focused on individual differences as predictors of empowerment, more recently the focus has shifted toward contextual factors that relate to psychological empowerment (e.g., Seibert, Wang, & Courtright, 2011). When meetings go well, they can constitute one such contextual factor. Satisfying meetings can provide psychological resources to employees (Cohen, Rogelberg, Allen, & Luong, 2011), which suggests that satisfying meetings may contribute to individual psychological empowerment in the workplace.