The Ubiquity of Meeting Lateness! A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Small to Moderate Effects of Workplace Meeting Lateness

Allen, Joseph A.; Lehmann‐Willenbrock, Nale; Meinecke, Annika L.; Landowski, Nicole; Rogelberg, Steven G.; Lucianetti, Lorenzo; Tong, Jiajin; Madrid, Héctor P.

doi:10.1177/10693971211024193

Cited by 6 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Meeting lateness refers to attendees arriving to a meeting past the scheduled start time, or to a meeting that begins after its scheduled start time (Rogelberg et al, 2014). Recent cross-cultural findings from China, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and the U.S. show that meeting lateness is a pervasive phenomenon, with 44 to 55 per cent of regular meetings starting late because at least one attendee does not show up on time (Allen et al, 2021). Meeting lateness has been observed to result in organizational costs with wasted time and resources (Rogelberg et al, 2012), to damage interpersonal relationships (Mroz & Allen, 2017), to negatively affect the ways groups communicate (Lehmann-Willenbrock & Allen, 2020), and to harm group performance (Allen et al, 2018a, 2018b).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The key features of workplace meetings: Conceptualizing the why, how, and what of meetings at work

Allen

Lehmann‐Willenbrock

2022

Organizational Psychology Review

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Given the focal role that group and team meetings play in shaping employees’ work lives (and schedules), the scarcity of conceptual and empirical attention to the topic in extant organizational psychology research is a major oversight that stalls scientific understanding of organizational behavior more broadly. With the explosion of meetings in recent years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some even wonder why organizational psychology has not already figured out meetings from both a science and practice perspective. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the extant literature on the science of workplace meetings and sort the works by identifying the key features of the meeting phenomenon. The five key features of workplace meetings identified include Leading, Interacting, Managing Time, Engaging, and Relating. We couch these features within a larger framework of how meetings are the intersection of collaboration in organizations and indispensable to organizational success. Against this conceptual backdrop, we reviewed a total of 253 publications, noting opportunities for future research and discussing practical implications. Plain Language Summary Given the focal role that group and team meetings play in shaping employees’ work lives (and schedules), the scarcity of conceptual and empirical attention in extant organizational psychology research is a major oversight that stalls scientific understanding of organizational behavior more broadly. With the explosion of meetings that has occurred in recent years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some even wonder why organizational psychology has not already figured out meetings from both a science and practice perspective. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the science of workplace meetings by identifying the core features of the phenomenon and sorting the extant literature along these features. The five core features identified include leading, interacting, managing time, engaging, relating. We couch these features within a larger framework of how meetings are the intersection of collaboration in organizations and a major key to organizational success. Against this conceptual backdrop, we reviewed a total of 253 publications, noting opportunities for future research and discussing practical implications. We conclude our review with an overview of the special issue on workplace meetings, which is an overt attempt to launch research that will fill the theoretical and conceptual gap in the science of meetings.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The key features of workplace meetings: Conceptualizing the why, how, and what of meetings at work

Allen

Lehmann‐Willenbrock

2022

Organizational Psychology Review

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“…There may be other behaviors in meetings, such as complaining [90], interrupting, or criticizing [54], that have larger implications for the ways in which teams and individuals function. Also, workers from various cultural backgrounds may not rate meeting lateness as severe of a transgression compared to U.S. workers [14,91].…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To help address this gap and to be more specific about the kinds of SAs needed, we focus on one particular type of social transgression, meeting lateness [12][13][14]. Meeting lateness refers to an attendee arriving after the identified start of a meeting [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meeting lateness refers to an attendee arriving after the identified start of a meeting [12]. This can be in reference to a set clock time or it can be more relationally defined [14]. Previous research confirmed that people are upset when their colleagues arrive late to meetings and thereby Merits 2023, 3 delay work being accomplished [12,13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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“So, Why Were You Late Again?”: Social Account’s Influence on the Behavioral Transgression of Being Late to a Meeting

Allen

Eden

Castro

et al. 2023

Merits

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People often offer an excuse or an apology after they do something wrong in an attempt to mitigate any potential negative consequences. In this paper, we examine how individuals employ social accounts when explaining their interpersonal transgression of meeting lateness to others in actual work settings. We examined the different combinations of social accounts and the social outcomes (forgiveness, helping behaviors, and intentions to continue interaction) of being late to a meeting. Across two studies using complementary experimental and survey methods, we found that a majority of late arrivers’ explanations included remorse and that including remorse significantly influences helping behaviors. Furthermore, we found no interaction between excuses and offering remorse. Implications of these findings and future directions are discussed.

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“…This in turn means that scripts can change over time when behaviors, norms, or context change. A recent paper by Allen et al (2021) provides a good example. The authors argue that due to globalization, meeting participants in culturally different contexts are now experiencing meeting lateness more similarly than they did before.…”

Section: Contributions To Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture-driven scripts for meetings: An integrative theoretical lens for studying workplace meetings

Köhler

Tenzer²,

Cramton

2022

Organizational Psychology Review

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The current research conceptualizes workplace meetings as socially embedded forms of organizing and proposes that cross-cultural comparisons of workplace meetings offer insights into differences in meeting structures and processes. This provides a deeper understanding of how meetings drive organizing in different cultural settings. Specifically, we build programmatic theory proposing cognitive and behavioral scripts as a promising theoretical lens through which to capture and integrate sociocultural influences on workplace meetings. We adapt Cramton et al.'s (2021) cultural coordination scripts formulation (consisting of the task setting, role structure, temporal structure, and cues) to develop an interpretive framework for workplace meeting processes that orients future research on cross-cultural meetings. We further integrate existing research on cross-cultural meeting differences to develop a generic prototype meeting script and two illustrative examples of culturally specific meeting scripts (for German and U.S.-American meetings) to demonstrate the practical usefulness and usability of this programmatic theory. Plain Language Summary Workplace meetings are used by organizations to maintain their overarching goals and purpose. They are an important, maybe the most important, tool through which members of the organization ensure its functioning and the pursuit of its purpose. The form of meetings and the processes involved in carrying out meetings are influenced by the cultural context(s) in which the meeting is held and the organization resides. Previous research has identified meeting characteristics and processes that differ across cultures. Comparisons of meeting structures and processes embedded in different cultural contexts can help researchers explore how variations in meeting characteristics contribute to organizing in organizations. This in turn allows researchers to better illuminate, explain, and guide the management of meetings to support their core goals and purpose. In the current paper, we propose a novel way of conceptualizing, capturing, and studying cross-cultural variations in meeting structures and processes, using the lens of cognitive and behavioral scripts. Scripts are cognitive structures that organize knowledge around how events typically unfold and provide prescriptions for the ways in which actors should interact over time to achieve coordinated action in a task situation. We employ Cramton et al.'s (2021) cultural coordination scripts formulation to create a definition of meeting scripts as well as prototype meeting scripts that can provide the foundation for future meetings research and for improved facilitation of cross-cultural meetings in organizations. Furthermore, we build an overarching, integrative theoretical framework for understanding cross-cultural meeting differences, which will guide future research endeavors into and theorizing about meetings in different cultural contexts.

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The Ubiquity of Meeting Lateness! A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Small to Moderate Effects of Workplace Meeting Lateness

Cited by 6 publications

References 62 publications

The key features of workplace meetings: Conceptualizing the why, how, and what of meetings at work

The key features of workplace meetings: Conceptualizing the why, how, and what of meetings at work

“So, Why Were You Late Again?”: Social Account’s Influence on the Behavioral Transgression of Being Late to a Meeting

Culture-driven scripts for meetings: An integrative theoretical lens for studying workplace meetings

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