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Meetings in Organizations:
Do They Contribute to Stakeholder Value
and Personal Meaning?

Presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting

Philadelphia, Pa., USA, August 3-8, 2007

Do not quote without permission

Ib Ravn

Learning Lab Denmark

The Danish School of Education, AarhusUniversity

Tuborgvej 164, 2400 CopenhagenNV, Denmark

, cell: +45 28 95 95 01

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Abstract

Meetings in organizations have evolved from the infrequent, slightly authoritarian meeting of the 1950’s to the ubiquitous and often longwinded meeting of the 1990’s. Today, two important, recent trends in work and business pose new challenges: Organizational work is seen as having to serve all organizational stakeholders, not just owners, and work must be subjectively meaningful to the modern, demanding and well-educated employee.Do meetings answer to these challenges? A survey of 300 knowledge workers in five highly successful companiesin Denmark showed thatalthough employees were satisfied with their managers’ traditional meeting-management skills, the customer was largely invisible in organizational meetings, and meetings engage the hearts and minds of the employees only to a moderate degree. It is concluded that despite massive changes in business and work life,meetingsseem to have changed little. They have beeninsufficiently integrated into the organizational value chain and they areexperienced as only moderately important to customers and employees.

Key words: Meeting Management, Meetings,Personal Meaning, Stakeholder Value.

1. Meetings are Everywhere

Meetings are prevalent in modern organizational life. The bureaucratic and corporate routines of yesteryear have given way to perennial change, and meetings are a major means to control this. Mergers and acquisitions, interdisciplinary projects, team-based work and widespread innovation all call for meetings that coordinate, delegate, share knowledge and ownership and move projects forward. Various studies find that managers spend 25-80% of their time in meetings, and managers report that they go to more meetings than previously (Romano and Nunamaker, 2001, p. 3).

Despite the ubiquity of meetings, they have received relatively little scholarly attention. There are popular books lambasting meetings (Lencioni, 2004) and there are scores of how-to books based on the authors’ personal experience (e.g., Streibel, 2002; Miller and Pincus, 2004).The advent of the computer prompted a considerable literature on computer-mediated meetings and conferences (Jessup and Valacich, 1991; Niederman, 1996) which is, however, of slight relevance to the common face-to-face meeting. There are vast amountsof research on the performance of teams and small groups(Guzzo and Dickson, 1996; Turner, 1999), some of which, of course, do their business in meetings.

However, as pointed out in one of the few monographs in the non-field of meeting studies (Schwartzman 1989, p. 10-11), “Meetings have generally been the background structure for examining and assessing what are assumed to be the ’really’ important matters of organizational life, for example, power, decisions, ideology, and conflict”. The meeting per se, as a social institution worthy of study in its own right,does not appear frequently in the scholarly literature (some of the odd studies include five pages in Mintzberg, 1973; Schwartzman, 1986; Panko and Kinney, 1995; Bluedorn, Turban and Love, 1999; Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield, 2006; Rogelberg, in press). These studies are empirical and experimental; none has any significant theoretical content.

The present paper grew out of a perceived need to understand meetings and help clarify their potentials in modern organizational life. It reports conceptualizations of meetings in organizations and results from a study of meetings in five knowledge-intensivecorporations in Denmark.

2. The Recent History of Meetings in Organizations

We may identify two broad phases in the recent history of meeting behaviour in the North-western European countries and, possibly, North America.

Fifty years ago, work in business and government organizations was more stable and predictable than today. Meetings in organizations were probably fewer. The manager chairing a typical meetingwould likely open the floor to comments when he (it was typically a he) needed to hear some, and would close it when he had heard enough. We may assume that whether the meeting was productive or not, the authority of the manager to run it his way was rarely in dispute. His goal was to run a tight ship, such that his company produced satisfactory levels of output or his public bureaucracy conformed to his superior’s expectations and to standard operating procedures. Let us call this the authoritarian meeting. It held sway well into the 1960’s and 1970’s and is still found in many traditionally managed organizations.

This ready acceptance of authority structures changed in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The youth movement of the 1960’s and its general anti-authoritarian sentiments diffused slowly into the organizational cultures of government administration and the business world. Management styles became more informal, the boss’ big desk got smaller, managers delegated more,self-managed work teams appeared, and office workers became more involved at meetings. Children of the 60’s, especially those exposed to modern educational principles, as in Scandinavia, came to expect that everyone has a right to speak and be heard. Sitting in a circle, waiting for your turn to speak, and listening respectfully to everyone regardless of age, status or experience, were norms that traveled from the kindergarten to the boardroom over the last decades of the century.

In the domain of meetings, this democratic-egalitarian relaxation of authority meant that the floor was thrown wide open. In the interest of delegation and involvement, managers letmore people in the meeting have their say, and opinions were offered more freely. Office workers became better educated over the decades and did indeed have more to contribute.As restraints on speaking at meetings fell away, meetings became more time-consuming, and possibly less productive—at least, that is a common perception. Meetings may always have been ineffective, as portrayed by C. Northcote Parkinson (1962), but with meetings so much more prevalent and organizational response ratesin other domains having generally picked up, the need to address meeting ineffectiveness has become pressing.

3. Theory: Stakeholder Value and Personal Meaning

How do the intentions or philosophies underlying authoritarian and egalitarian meeting styles play out today? We no longer have the placid business environment of the 1950’s in which the authoritarian leader thrived, nor do we have the lifestyle-experimental 1960’s and 70’s that engendered egalitarian meeting cultures. We may expect the intentions or motivating forces behind these meeting styles to look different today.

From Authoritarian Control to the Interests of the Customer

First, consider the authoritarian management style with its urge to control a meeting. In today’s business environment, how may we understand this essential intention behind this? Well, the original concern was obviously with making the right decisions and using resources optimally, for the good of the corporation.

Today, the good of the corporation is being seen in a wider context.In the social-democratic capitalisms of North-western Europe, there is growing awareness that a corporation needs to attend not only to its own growth potentials, but alsoto societal wealth and well-being.

The post-WW2 emphasis on increasing industrial outputs and raising the standard of living has given way to concerns with quality: the quality of services and products, and the quality of life in society. In local and national government, the self-sufficiency of mid-century bureaucracies yielded to the service management and the service economy of the 1980’s, where the needs of users and citizens are in focus, and to New Public Management in the 1990’s with its emphasis on value for money in the public sector.

To be sure, large corporations, especially in the US, are currently gripped by the specter of shareholder value and find themselves slaves to the quarterly earnings report, but the larger societal undercurrent is about stakeholder value (Freeman, 1984). This is the idea that an organization exists to serve the needs of all those who hold a stake in it: customers and users, employees, investors/owners, suppliers, the local community and society at large (Donaldson and Preston, 1995).

Stakeholder value is about more than securing a proper return for shareholders on their investment, it is about that which is valuable to an organization’s many and varied stakeholders: the quality of life of employees, customers and local citizens,the satisfaction of their real needs, and the fulfillment of human potentials in society as a whole (Ackoff, 1994; Ackoff and Rovin, 2003).

That both the private and public sectors be concerned with meeting basic human needs is a position increasingly taken by international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme(2005) the UN Global Business Compact ( Capitalist stalwarts like the World Bank has recently (Perry, Arias, López, Maloney Servén,2006) urged the Latin American economies to invest in human capital and fight poverty to obtain economic growth, and the Bank’s annual World Development report summarizesthe evidence: “The main message is that in the long run, the pursuit of equity is complementary, in some fundamental respects, to the pursuit of long-term prosperity” (World Bank, 2006, p. 2).

The concept of the value chain represents a related concern with ascertaining that every aspect of a firm’s operations contributes something of value to the end product or service. Popularized by Porter (1985), this concept is used mostly to mean monetary value, but applies equally to the more encompassing concept of stakeholder value. Being concerned about value chains is making sure that every organizational activity contributes maximally to stakeholder value. No activity in the organization can be exempt from the value chain, including meetings.

Applied to meeting management, the concepts of stakeholder value and value chains imply that ultimately, meetings are held for the sake of all stakeholder groups. The quality of a meeting may be judged by the value it adds to the organization’s products or services—this value being gauged by the product’s contribution to the quality of products and the quality of stakeholders’ lives. If a meeting contributes to the stakeholder value chain, it is a good meeting; if it does not, it is poor.

To be more specific: The proverbial bad meeting that wastes everybody’s time with rambling speeches, unfocused discussions, loose ends, etc. is undesirable because it does not help meeting attendees make the decisions required for them to deliver the products or services that their customers depend on. We go to meetings neitherto win a debating session nor to enjoy coffee and donuts with office mates, but to coordinate our activities so that we may serve our customers in the best way we possibly can.

From Egalitarianism to Personal Meaning

What is the modern-day equivalent to the second phase in meeting styles identified, the egalitarian meeting that lets everybody have their say? Presumably, the original motivation was to open up the meeting to other voices than the manager’s. Democracy writ small, so to speak. Being able to speak one’s mind and influence decisions in the workplace was a victory that has been celebrated by the labor union movement and which, of course, revolutionized meetings as well, over the course of several decades.

Today, however, the right to speak and be heard is taken for granted by most employees. The openness and pluralism associated with the opportunity to voice one’s opinions are now endemic in Western society. Firm values have become unstuck in the maelstrom of post-modern globalization; social meanings have are subject to constant renegotiation. Today, there is much more of a burden on 18-year-olds to invent their worlds for themselves from scratch.

For many, work provides a relief from the uncertainties of post-modern living. Seen in this light, it is clear that young people want more out of work than just the hard-won openness and participation of the previous generations. Participation in organizational decision-making and in meetingsis fine, of course. It is simply a baseline today, and jobs that do not involve employees at all are intolerable to many. But when participation results in endless discussions and no action, it doesn’t provide the focus and closure that people want in their professional as well personal lives.

Work must help modern employees create major meanings for themselves. Perhaps not a meaning in life per se; most people still like to see their lives as larger than their jobs (not least, of course, because employment may be terminated an any time, and what happens to a life whose meaning was tied too closely to a particular job?). But today, work must be personally meaningful, to an extent unheard of thirty years ago, when a steady job with health benefits and a decent retirement plan were all that mattered to many people.

Today, employees are no longer functionaries performing fixed functions in the organization. Employers expect employees to help invent their own jobs and change them as conditions change. There is no pre-set meaning to be found in the organization, everything has to be constructed. To sustain herself, work must be meaningful, or else there is nothing.

We may express this shift in terms of the transition from functional work to knowledge work (Drucker, 1999). In industrial society, functionaries perform fixed functions in the organization. Today’s knowledge-based organization has few tasks that are predefined; the only fixity is the organization’s mission that stakeholders X be served in domain Y and whatever this takes are the tasks that need to be carried out. In the absence of extensive job descriptions, managers in today’s knowledge economy expect knowledge workers to help create their jobs by spotting and seizing the “tasks” that need to get done.

Vice versa, knowledge workers want organizations, managers and job in which this process of joint definition is possible and generates work that fits the individual employee’s interests and talents. Such work is experienced as personally meaningful—when in the turmoil of modern organizational work an employee and her manager have carved out a niche that lets her unfold her potentials for a common good that extends beyond the office.

Applied to the meeting, this means that the knowledge worker expects meetings be subjectively meaningful. Thirty years ago, silent rows of lower-rung functionaries could be required to go to meetings just to listen and observe. Knowledge workers are less likely to accept this role. Not only do they want to air their opinions, they also want the meeting to provide direction to their personal work. Just as young and well-educated employees will leave a job if “it doesn’t feel right,” so meetings will be shunned if they are felt to be a “waste of my time,” regardless of the fact that your manager may want you to be present.

In the optimal case, personal meaningfulness in meetings may go hand in hand with meeting productivity and efficiency, if the meeting contributes to stakeholder value, that is, serves the needs of customers and other external stakeholders. The challenge for themodern manager is to run meetings in such a way that both ends are served, so that employees find meetings personally meaningful—because they help provide direction and personal fulfillment to each attendee—and conducive to stakeholder value—because the direction given is one that leads to maximum stakeholder value.

Research Questions

At this point, we may reasonably ask: If these are indeed emerging trends in organizational life at the turn of the millennium, how well do modern, knowledge-based corporations adapt to them? Specifically, do the meetings held in such organizations reflect the growing concern with generating value for the stakeholders and personal meaning for the employees?

In addition, as we inquire into the performance of meetings in modern organizations, we wish to know how they measure up on such basic variables as the number of meetings and the time spent in meetings, as well as elementary meeting-management skills such as timekeeping, use of agendas, discussion moderation and decision making in meetings.

To obtain answers to these questions, we recruited five knowledge-intensive corporations in Denmark. All are established, highly profitable companies that are successfully making the transition from industrial society to a knowledge-based economy.

At the outset, and despite the excellent financial standing and fine reputations of these five companies, we did not expect meeting participants to be conscious of customers and other stakeholders during the meeting. Keeping the customer in mind while running or participating in a meeting seemed to require such a stretch of the imagination—despite its obviousrelevance—that we did not expect to see much evidence of it. Let us phrase this expectation as an hypothesis:

H1: Meetings will show little evidence of customer orientation or stakeholder value creation.