Meeting Performance and Group Dynamics ETM5361/MSIS5600 Managing Virtual Project Teams

1. Meeting Performance and Group DynamicsETM5361/MSIS5600Managing Virtual Project Teams Nicholas C. Romano, Jr., Ph.D. Nicholas-Romano@mstm.okstate.eduPaul E. Rossler, Ph.D., P.E. prossle@okstate.edu

2. Overview • How efficient and effective are most meetings? • Has meeting performance improved over time with the availability of technology? • What are the causes of poor meetings? • What tendencies do groups exhibit?

3. Are these tendencies exacerbated in virtual team settings? • What are the processes and structures associated with effective meetings?

4. Meeting analysis: Findings from research and practice • Why consider meetings in virtual teaming? • Defining meetings • Meeting productivity metrics Romano, N. C., & Nunamaker, J. F. 2001. Meeting analysis: Findings from research and practice. Paper presented at the Proceedings of 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

5. Why consider meetings in virtual teaming? Research and practice illustrate that meetings: • Are essential for accomplishing work • Dominate employees’ and managers’ time • Are considered costly, unproductive, dissatisfying • Are steadily increasing in number and length

6. "Almost every time there is a genuinely important decision to be made in an organization, a group is assigned to make it -- or at least to counsel and advise the individual who must make it." -Hackman

7. "We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done. We meet because the knowledge and experience needed in a specific situation are not available in one head, but have to be pieced together out of the knowledge and experience of several people.” - Peter Drucker (1967)

8. Meetings do not go away in virtual teaming We need to understand today’s meetings as thoroughly as possible in order to move toward collaborating in a virtual world One way to do this is through Meeting Productivity Metrics

9. Existing meeting productivity metrics • Types • Purposes • Time • Number • Cost • Efficiency • Problems

10. Types of meetings in Corporate America 45% Staff 22% Task 21% Information Sharing 5% Brainstorming 2% Ceremonial 5% Other Based on 903 meetings (Monge, P. R., McSween, C., & Wyer, J. 1989)

11. Meeting purposes: 66% involve complex group processes (Monge, P. R., McSween, C., & Wyer, J. 1989)

12. Time spent in meetingsshows an upward trend 1960’s: Average Exec. 3 1/2 hrs/wk (~3-4 Meetings) Additional time in informal meetings (Tillman, 1960)

13. 1970’s: Average Exec. 6-7/wk (~2x 1960’s Study - Rice, 1973) Managers up to 60% of their time. (Mintzberg, 1973)Program managers up to 80% of their time.Middle managers 3 or 4 full days a week.Some 8 straight hours in one meeting. (Van de Ven, 1973)

14. 1980’s: Typical middle managers ~35% of their work week. Top mangers 50% of their time. (Doyle, 1982) Typical managers up to 80% of their time. (Monge, 1989)Average technical professional/manager 1/4 work week.Top and middle managers 2 days/week.Executive managers 4 days/week. (Mosvick, 1987)

15. Mosvick (1982, 1986) in 2 studies over a 5 year period of 950 junior-senior managers and technical professionals in large-scale technology-intensive industries U.S. and abroad Major finding: "a notable shift toward an increase in the number and length of meetings with an increasingly high level of dissatisfaction with meetings."

16. Reported length of meetings: 51% between 30 and 90 minutes (Monge, P. R., McSween, C., & Wyer, J. 1989)

17. Time spent in meetingsshows an upward trend (cont’d.) Up to 20% of a manager’s work day is spent in conference room meetings. (Panko, 1992) Managers spend ~ 20% of their work day in 5 person or largerformal meetings and as much as 85% of their time communicating. (Panko, 1994)

18. Meeting frequency is increasing Fortune 500 companies hold between 11 to 15 million formal meetings/day and 3 to 4 billion meetings/year(Doyle, 1982; Monge, 1989) A 1997 survey found that 24% of respondents expect to hold more meetings in 1998 and 85% predict the same length or longer meetings

19. Meeting costs The 3M Meeting Productivity Study and Harrison Hofstra Study found that… • 11-15 Million formal meetings / day • ? Million informal meetings / day • 3-4 Billion meetings / year • 30-80% Manager’s time in teamwork • 7-15% of personnel budgets on teamwork • $ billions of spent each year

20. Meeting efficiency On average, by managerial function, 33% of meeting time is unproductive (Sheridan, 1989)

22. Meeting problems: Agenda (or lack thereof) No goals or agenda – 2nd most commonly reported problem (Mosvick, 1987) ~ 50% had no written agenda; However 73% of respondents felt an agenda is "essential" for a productive meeting. (Burleson, 1990; Sheridan, 1989 - Harrison-Hofstra Survey)

23. 32% No stated agenda 17% Prior Verbal agendas 9% Written agendas distributed at start 29% Prior written agendas (Monge, 1989)

24. Workers express the desire to work in groups 3 year survey of 10,277 U.S. workers from all levels of employment that 97% reported they needed conditions that encourage collaboration to do their best work. (Hall, 1994)

25. A recent survey of executives found that… 43% of them admitted dozing off at least once during a meetingThe majority concluded that 20-30% of meetings were unnecessary (Erickson, 1998)

26. Findings Decades of study show that meetings dominate workers’ and managers’ time and yet are considered to be costly, unproductive and dissatisfying. Yet meetings are essential, because no one person has the knowledge, insight, skills and experience to do the job alone. (Erickson, 1998)

27. Look who’s talking • Traditional Teamwork • Boss talked 33% of time • Next person 22% • Technology Supported Teamwork • Boss talked 5 % • Next person 8% Source: Romano

28. A quick review of difficulties with groups • Some tasks are simply not well suited for group methods or processes • Often develop preferred ways of looking at problems that can inhibit innovation • Synergistic effect can be absent • For example, brainstorming doesn’t exceed performance of individually produced and combined results

29. Politics, power, and position can dominate methods or results • Or can suppress contributions of others • A group fulfills social needs, but group seldom has ways of regulating amount • Fairly reliable characteristic of groups to get off track and get stuck there

30. Groups tend to have relatively low aspiration levels with respect to quality of solutions accepted • Once some level of acceptance is inferred, little further search happens • Often lack concern and method for dealing with way to best utilize and communicate members’ knowledge

31. Strongly influenced by cultural norms • In natural groups, members tend to be conservative, circumspect • If the group’s efforts do not appear reinforced, effort is reduced • As group size increases, effort contributed by each individual member tends to decrease

32. Reliably exhibit norms against devoting time to planning their methods • Move immediately to attacking problem, relying on implicitly shared methods • Considerable likelihood that method is poorly adapted to task and only modestly effective • Seldom have ability to change the method when things not going well

33. Effective use of roles and process help direct dynamics • Group process management roles • Group process member roles • Task • Maintenance • Non-productive • Group process communication patterns • Team member roles

34. An input-process-output model of teamwork Group Task Process Outcome Context Technology (Source: Doug Vogel)

35. Process gains • More information • Synergy • More objective evaluation • Stimulation (encouragement) • Learning Source: Nunamaker, J.F., R.O. Briggs, and D.D. Mittleman, Electronic meeting systems: Ten years of lessons learned, in Groupware: Technology and applications, D. Coleman and R. Khanna, Editors. 1995, Prentice-Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ. p. 149-193.

36. Air time fragmentation Attenuation blocking Concentration blocking Attention blocking Failure to remember Conformance pressure Evaluation apprehension Free riding Cognitive inertia Socializing Domination Information overload Coordination problems Incomplete use of information Incomplete task analysis Process losses Source: Nunamaker, J.F., R.O. Briggs, and D.D. Mittleman

37. Common process losses

38. Process losses (cont’d.)

39. Process losses (cont’d.)

40. Process losses (cont’d.)

41. Process losses (cont’d.)

42. Process oriented model of virtual teamwork Social Interactions and Dynamics GSS Structures Meeting Outcomes Time Reinig, B. A., & Shin, B. 2002. The dynamic effects of group support systems on group meetings. Journal of Management Information Systems, 19(2): 303-325.

43. Evaluation Apprehension (?) Hypothesized relationships - - Production Blocking Group Cohesion + - - Time Period Free Riding Self-Reported Learning GSS + - Sucker Effect Affective Reward - + Source: Reinig, B. A., & Shin, B. 2002.

44. Some (preliminary) findings - - Production Blocking Group Cohesion + - - - Time Period Free Riding Self-Reported Learning GSS + + - - Sucker Effect Affective Reward - + + Source: Reinig, B. A., & Shin, B. 2002.

45. Summary • Most meetings are not efficient or effective • And the increased availability of technology hasn’t helped reverse this trend • Unmanaged group dynamics seem to contribute to this inefficiency and ineffectiveness • Structure and process play important role in virtual team meeting performance • Group support systems help to mitigate or reduce the negative affect of process losses on performance