Take a Stand on Meetings

July 23, 1998
Contact: Jennifer Peck
Information Specialist
(573) 882-7869
[email protected]

MU RESEARCHERS TAKE A STAND ON MEETINGS

COLUMBIA, Mo.-- "Meetings are one of the things many people hate most about organizational life," says Allen Bluedorn, associate professor of management at the University of Missouri-Columbia. If he's right, people should be happy to hear about Bluedorn's recent research, which shows that if you make one slight change to the conventional meeting format, meetings will be significantly shorter. "What's the trick?" desperate employees across the nation are asking. Stand up.

Bluedorn and co-researchers Daniel Turban, an MU associate professor of management, and Mary Sue Love, an MU graduate student, found that stand-up meetings--those conducted with all participants standing--are significantly shorter than their sit-down counterparts.

So that should make the meeting-haters throughout the working world happier, right? Not so, this first-of-its-kind research says. Satisfaction was significantly higher in participants of sit-down meetings.

"Part of the reason is simply comfort," Bluedorn said. "People were significantly more comfortable in the sit-down meetings, and the more comfortable people were, the more satisfied they were with the meeting. However, the comfort-satisfaction correlation was moderate in size, so other processes were probably at work, too. What these processes are is something to be investigated in future research."

Because of this finding on satisfaction, the research suggests that if managers value human relations benefits such as morale and participation, they might want to continue to use sit-down meetings, in which employees feel more satisfied. If a manager's emphasis is productivity and goal achievement, he might find stand-up meetings more suitable for the office, for efficiency's sake.

Bluedorn said one of the most surprising results of the research, which will be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is that the decision-making that occurs in the stand-up meetings is of no lower quality than the decisions made in sit-down meetings.

"We expected to find that stand-up meetings would be shorter, mainly because of comfort issues," Bluedorn said. "What we didn't expect to find was that the quality of decision-making in these meetings would be of equal quality to that of decision-making in sit down meetings."

It's important to note, Bluedorn says, that the results of this research are from meetings that lasted about 10 to 20 minutes and in which only one decision was made.

"Because ours is the pioneering research about the effects of posture on meetings, practitioners should be cautious as they experiment with stand-up meetings," Bluedorn said. "Our results indicate the group decision-making process seemed to function equally well in both formats, but I should emphasize again that this was for a single decision made in a 10- to 20 minute time frame. We don't know enough yet to suggest that organizations start holding hour long stand-up meetings to deal with a full agenda of decisions. My advice to managers interested in giving this a try is to proceed cautiously, one step and type of meeting at a time."

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