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The effects of stand-up and sit-down meeting formats on meeting outcomes
Abstract
The effects of meeting format (standing or sitting) on meeting length and the quality of group decision making were investigated by comparing meeting outcomes for 56 five-member groups that conducted meetings in a standing format with 55 five-member groups that conducted meetings in a seated format. Sit-down meetings were 34% longer than stand-up meetings, but they produced no better decisions than stand-up meetings. Significant differences were also obtained for satisfaction with the meeting and task information use during the meeting but not for synergy or commitment to the group's decision. The findings were generally congruent with meeting-management recommendations in the time-management literature, although the lack of a significant difference for decision quality was contrary to theoretical expectations. This contrary finding may have been due to differences between the temporal context in which this study was conducted and those in which other time constraint research has been conducted, thereby revealing a potentially important contingency—temporal context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, in a book that has become an EBM classic, provide a series of examples to illustrate the value of this approach (Pfeffer and Sutton 2006). In particular, they argue, based on research by psychologists at the University of Missouri at Columbia (Bluedorn et al. 1999), that a company such as Chevron could significantly increase productivity by requiring its employees to stand up during meetings. This second example is an epistemological belief, this time implicit, about the probative value of Bluedorn et al. (1999). ...
... In particular, they argue, based on research by psychologists at the University of Missouri at Columbia (Bluedorn et al. 1999), that a company such as Chevron could significantly increase productivity by requiring its employees to stand up during meetings. This second example is an epistemological belief, this time implicit, about the probative value of Bluedorn et al. (1999). The corollary of this idea is the other spontaneous epistemological belief, also implicit, that a single academic article can constitute "evidence". ...
... For example, it is wrong to believe, as some EBM theorists seem to assume, that an academic paper alone can Rousseau (2006) Theoretical Scientific literature provides more reliable evidence of how effective a practice is than professional experience. Pfeffer and Sutton (2006, p. 179) Theoretical Bluedorn et al. (1999) show that meetings are more effective when attendees remain standing. ...
The necessity of epistemological theorisation for management science is questionable. However, epistemology can be useful if the following distinction between three kinds of epistemology, usually overlooked, is taken into account: epistemology as a structured academic discipline, epistemology as an intellectual exercise produced outside academic epistemology, and finally the epistemology specific to each researcher. When this distinction is not made, epistemology can become counterproductive and impede scientific work.
... The sensemaking and organizing approach to meetings may also enjoy a complementary relationship with other approaches to understanding meeting practice in organizations. For example, research on meeting formats and design characteristics suggests that these choices shape the outcomes of the 4 meeting both psychologically and from a productivity standpoint (Davison, 1999;Bluedorn, Turban, & Love, 1999). It may be that the organizational and meeting environment itself evolves as the sensemaking process unfolds, so effective facilitation amounts to the strategic adaptation of meeting communication processes to the needs of the group's ongoing organizing and sensemaking efforts (Coburn, 2001). ...
... The most common meeting form continues to be the face-to-face meeting, just as in the distant past (Bluedorn, Turban, & Love, 1999). The growing exception is the ability to have 16 distributed group meetings with individuals across large distances meeting via tele-and videoconferencing. ...
... This task is meant to create a realistic simulation of intergroup processes-such as turn-taking, speaking up, negotiating task approaches, and reaching sufficient consensus-that are major aspects of teamwork across many different specific contexts. Tasks such as this are common in lab-based team research (e.g., see Bluedorn et al., 1999). After the task was complete, participants completed the dependent variable measures individually. ...
There are conflicting findings in team diversity research on whether it is better for an individual on a team to be similar to or different from the rest of the team. This lab study with undergraduates completing a critical thinking and decision-making task uses optimal distinctiveness theory to examine the idea that finding a balance between these two states for team member personality will result in positive perceptions of team process. Our results supported this such that participants had the most positive perceptions of team process when optimally distinct from the rest of the team in terms of personality.
... The flexibility gained during the months of the crisis will continue to advance, especially concerning forms of work and learning.' 16 Besides the positive effect to the health of the employee (see Section 2.3.1 Physiological Limitations), standing meetings take significantly less time compared to sitting meetings according to Bluedorn et al. (1999). 17 The term 'Co-working' has been established to describe an open workplace structure shared by people with diverse job descriptions, diverse skill profiles who are not employed by a common company. ...
A comprehensive understanding of the needs of the user is required to design adequate workplace systems in general, but especially in the highly digitised area of industry where operators are interacting with autonomously operating machines. There is little knowledge in design criteria for professionals to enable adequate developments of system design for Human-Machine Interaction, e.g. Human-Robot Collaboration regarding the effects of design decisions to all three levels of Human Factors, i.e. physiological, cognitive and organisational limitations. Moreover, there is little known about objective measurement procedures that evaluate whether the operator subjectively perceives the workplace system design as assistance and improvement. The research presented in the following is affiliated with the scientific discipline of Human Factors Engineering and focuses on the evaluation of Human Factor issues within the digitised industry. Based on broad theoretical and empirical investigations, the results of this research extend our knowledge of adequate Human-Centred Design by providing reliable, powerful design criteria for workplaces where operators interact with machines/collaborate with robots, but also an overall technique, the Objective Workload Detection Method, for evaluation of the effectiveness of design investigation focusing on cognitive stress relief. Through the application of this method within a controlled experiment, the validation of the derived design criteria was confirmed. The study significantly shows how the cognitive workload can be relieved by an assisting environment. This work also gives one best-practice design example of a self-adapting workplace system for hybrid Human-Robot Teams. Following the Human-Centred Design method, the concept of Assisting Industrial Workplace System for Human-Robot Collaboration has been successfully developed as a flexible hybrid unit design. The prototype is related to a real-world scenario from the aerospace industry and the demonstrator was implemented within a laboratory set-up. This work seamlessly applies techniques from interdisciplinary science fields, e.g. Engineering, Neuroscience, Gestalt theory, and Design. Equally, the design criteria and the evaluation method will support professionals from varied disciplines to succeed in the creation process of future system-designs by giving a clear indication of future Human-Centred Design research.
... We used the NASA survival problem, a paradigm which first requires individual decision-making and then a repetition of the task in a group. This task has been widely used to empirically assess group problem-solving (e.g., Bluedorn et al., 1999;Erffmeyer & Lane, 1984;Meslec & Curşeu, 2013) and group collaboration (Miles et al., 2017), and provides a measure of how well groups solve a complex strategy task. This task is frequently used in managerial training settings, and is a reasonable analogue for the decision-making that often occurs in corporations and other organisational settings. ...
It is widely assumed that mindfulness training will lead to a range of benefits, from improved attentional capacities to better decision-making. Indeed, many large corporations have begun to provide workplace mindfulness training with the aim of improving group-based decision-making. Yet, there has been little empirical work testing the effects of mindfulness training on complex group-based task performance. In a randomised experimental study ( N = 332), we examine the effects of two different durations of mindfulness training on strategic decision-making using the classic NASA survival task, assessing individual and then group performance. We expected that a longer training duration (seven daily sessions) would be associated with better group performance relative to a “one-off” training session. We did not find such an association: groups in the longer training condition made slightly, but not significantly, more errors than groups in the one-off condition. We did not find any differences across training conditions when examining individual performance. Our findings should be interpreted in light of numerous studies demonstrating the benefits of even short durations of mindfulness practice on cognitive performance. We conclude that our lengthier mindfulness training duration did not confer measurable benefits over a one-off training session at either the individual or the group level on a strategic decision-making task.
Drawing on a motivated information processing model, we tested the hypothesis that groups' receptivity to outside advice is facilitated by their epistemic motivation—the desire to gain an accurate understanding of the world. Epistemic motivation was measured by proxy in Study 1 using a team task reflexivity measure, and was experimentally manipulated in Studies 2 and 3 by varying, respectively, either the amount of time allotted to complete the task or whether a consensus judgment was required before receiving advice. Receptivity to advice was operationalized as group advice seeking in Studies 1 and 2, and as advice utilization in Study 3. In support of our hypothesis, groups with higher levels of epistemic motivation consistently sought out and utilized advice more than those with lower levels of epistemic motivation. Moreover, epistemic motivation affected judgment accuracy via groups' receptivity to advice.
The term “meeting science” first appears in the 2015 publication The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science, edited by Allen, Lehamann–Willenbrock, and Rogelberg. The field looks at actual meetings and their components, usually through observations and surveys. As meetings occur in virtually every library environment, it behooves an investigation. There is a lack of empirical studies for meeting science in libraries. This article adds to the growing body of research in the area, explored from a library perspective. The authors investigate the predictors of success for productive meetings, librarian perceptions of effective meeting leadership, and best practices for meeting leadership.
Previous studies have demonstrated the possibility that when people are in standing rather than sitting postures, they have a stronger cognitive control propensity, making them inclined to agree more to sacrificing one innocent person and saving more people. Furthermore, this postural effect can be moderated by dual processes. In three studies, participants read dilemma scenarios followed by a proposed behavior to sacrifice one innocent person and save five or more people. The participants in sitting or standing postures were asked whether the described action was morally acceptable (moral judgment) and whether they would perform the described action (moral action). The results demonstrated that participants were more approving of the behavioral proposal in the moral action perspective than in the moral judgment perspective across the three studies. The hypothesized postural effect was found in a field study (Study 1) and replicated in a preregistered replication study (Study 2), and was further supported in an experimental study (Study 3). Compared with those in sitting postures, participants in standing postures expressed higher approval of the behavioral proposal compared to their sitting counterparts. Furthermore, the postural effect was dismissed when participants made moral decisions with a dual task to increase cognitive load, and it was reversed when they made moral decisions after deliberate consideration of the behavioral proposal (Study 3). The present research supports and extends the dual-process morality theory by demonstrating that body posture can affect moral decision-making; it also offers novel evidence revealing the moderating role of dual process on embodiment effects. It enriches our knowledge that morality is evolutionarily embodied in postures and that the dual process can moderate embodiment effects.
Two experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between the body posture of a message recipient and susceptibility to persuasive influence. In Experiment 1, recipients who were reclining comfortably during exposure to a counterattitudinal message showed more agreement with the message than recipients who were standing during exposure. In Experiment 2, posture (standing or reclining) and the quality of the arguments employed in the counterattitudinal message (cogent or specious) were varied in an effort to assess competing theoretical accounts of the posture effect. An interaction between posture and message quality emerged on the measure of postmessage agreement. Reclining subjects were differentially persuaded by the strong and weak arguments, but standing subjects were not. This pattern of results is consistent with the view that reclining recipients engage in more message-relevant thinking than standing recipients.
The efficacy of a training program designed to improve the quality of group decisions by increasing the decision-making capabilities of the group's members was evaluated. A study by P. C. Bottger and P. W. Yetton (see record
1988-09310-001) that demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach suffered from design flaws that threatened the internal validity of their conclusion. In the present study, a randomized design with adequate power was used, and the efficacy of this training was not supported for either individual or group decision quality. The data support Bottger and Yetton's contention that member ability is an important contributor to group performance. However, Bottger and Yetton's training program addressed general decision-making ability, whereas task-specific ability may be more important. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A correlational study examined group performance of a problem-solving task that required consensus in relation to 3 interpersonal behaviors: discussing strategy, inviting input, and asking or summarizing agreement. Participants did a simulated survival task individually and then worked toward consensus in 54 mixed-gender groups of 4 to 6. Group error scores indicated decision quality. Videotaped sessions were scored for observed behaviors. Rate of asking about or summarizing agreement correlated positively with group error. The same behaviors unexpectedly correlated with completion times, which correlated inversely with group error: Faster groups made more errors. Other behaviors were unrelated to group decision quality or completion time. Rate of discussing strategy declined over time; inviting input stayed stable; and rate of asking or summarizing agreement increased. Temporal trends were unrelated to performance. Implications are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This field experiment tested for the effect of time-management training on 56 employees at an Australian manufacturing company, half of whom attended a 3-day training program and half of whom did not. The training group subjects rated their management of time significantly higher after the program than did the group who did not attend the training program. The diary entries of the trained subjects over a 2-week period after the training program were also rated by three superiors as exhibiting significantly better time management than the diary entries of the untrained group. Given that subjects had been randomly assigned to the two conditions, these results suggest that appropriate training can cause employees to improve how they manage their time at work.
Individuals bring beliefs and knowledge to group meetings. Group decisions arise out of the exchange of these beliefs and knowledge. Because group interactions are mainly verbal, group verbal behavior should play a central role in determining the quality of group decisions, and process interventions should change group verbal behavior. Subjects were 168 new employees in a Japanese drug company, who constituted 42 four-person groups. Treatment groups received the Consensual Conflict Resolution (CCR) intervention that emphasizes a knowledge-based logical discussion and consensual resolution of conflicts. The group task was the NASA Moon Survival problem. It was found that (1) the quality of group decisions increases to the extent that group members exchange facts and reasons (defined as a "reasoning" orientation of group verbal behavior) and decreases to the extent that group members stick to their positions (defined as a "positional" orientation), and (2) the CCR intervention increases the reasoning orientation and decreases the positional orientation, thereby improving the quality of group decisions.