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Meetings frequently fail to meet the objectives or expectations of the participants. The factors that diminish performance, including creativity, can be addressed through the application of electronic group support systems. A brief history of group support systems is provided. Recent developments are examined, and it is suggested that the systems o...
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Transparency and collaborativeness are two essential features required for dependability. These two issues in social groups are not well studied. The present paper studies these two aspects in distributed work group environment such as Self Help Groups [SHGs]. There were several thousands of SHGs spread geographically all over India [about 3.367 mi...
Citations
... Looking at research on groups and teamwork, there are also technical and digital tools that can support collaboration and learning in teams: so-called 'group support systems' (GSS tools). Briggs and de Vreede [54] (1997) experimented with GSS techniques within a larger team in order to bypass problems that can occur in a group. With their research, they addressed a well-known group phenomenon in psychology called "group-think" (referring to Janis' research from 1971 on decision making, Kennedy, and the Bay of Pigs), where members of a group imitate each other, the group becomes too coherent, and critical reflection is stopped, which can cause a group to make bad decisions. ...
... The 'hard' characteristics introduced supportive ways of using digital GSS tools in meetings [54]. Firstly, the video format enabled the right participants to attend the meeting [47], and secondly, especially in the large-group meetings [44], the sharing of individual perspectives influenced how participants perceived meeting effectiveness. ...
... Case 8, the 'Making Sense' meeting, broke new ground in terms of how GSS tools [54,72], which are easily accessible through smartphones, support the effectiveness of large-group meetings that are constricted by time limitations. The case illustrates how a GSS tool can support the integration of different perspectives in a time-efficient and non-hierarchical manner by displaying anonymous input on large screens and organizing them in diagrams and word clouds. ...
While research on the sustainable built environment has acknowledged the need to integrate multidisciplinary perspectives in the early planning phases, few studies have focused on early-phase meetings and how these can support such co-creation of sustainability. In this study, a set of “characteristics” for collaborative meetings integrating multidisciplinary perspectives was tested in 16 meetings that took place in the early phase. An action research insider perspective was used, where a researcher was also the facilitator of these 16 meetings. The cases provide insights into the early-phase processes where the building industry can achieve sustainable impacts on the built environment. This was exemplified by two of the cases becoming demonstration projects in terms of sustainability. Empirical material was gathered through discussions and surveys with meeting participants and was analyzed through the lens of the meeting design characteristics. The findings show that processes with ‘soft’ interpersonal characteristics (expressing emotions, tempo change during dialogue, engaging in social interaction, moving the body) support the development of a shared understanding of sustainability that integrates multidisciplinary perspectives. For larger groups and in digital meetings, a combination of ‘soft’ (interpersonal) and ‘hard’ (digital communication tools and platforms) characteristics were found to be supportive, especially when the meeting time was limited. This research suggests a revision of the design of multidisciplinary early-phase meetings towards including social, emotional, bodily, and collaborative exercises supported by digital tools.
... al. were the first to introduce the term "Electronic Meeting System" (perhaps a descendant or variant of the "Group Communication Support System" [23]), which categorizes technologies "designed to directly impact and change the behavior of groups" [21]. Over the past few decades, researchers have produced a plethora of systems [28,4,2,26] that fit this categorization (though usage of the term itself seems to have waned over the years). ...
Recent work in human-computer interaction has explored the use of conversational agents as facilitators for group goal-oriented discussions. Inspired by this work and by the apparent lack of tooling available to support it, we created Diplomat, a Python-based framework for building conversational agent facilitators. Diplomat is designed to support simple specification of agent functionality as well as customizable integration with online chat services. We document a preliminary user study we conducted to help inform the design of Diplomat. We also describe the architecture, capabilities, and limitations of our tool, which we have shared on GitHub.
... Meetings offer discursive and orientation practices (Seidl & Guérard, 2015) and are constitutive activities (Scott et al., 2015). They enable discussion-based problem solving and idea generation, information sharing, and reflection of assumptions as well as strategic decision-making (Bagire, Byarugaba, & Kyogabiirwe, 2015;Briggs & Vreede, 1997;Scott et al., 2015). SAP studies have illustrated that practices such as meetings allow iteration and adaptation of strategy as well as renewing the organization from within by including or excluding, legitimizing or delegitimizing certain people, choices, or practices (Vaara & Whittington, 2012). ...
Organizations increasingly view their internal staff as a source of innovation and change and tend to involve an increasing number of organizational members in strategy work. This inclusion is a form of decentralized strategy and usually takes place in meetings. This chapter explores how meetings can become a planned emergence strategy for unlocking endogenous innovation potential. Data have been gathered from a still ongoing field project in which employees of six public offices such as the police or fire brigade participate. The public offices’ administration is characterized by a traditional division of responsibility, meaning that strategy has so far been the business of only few people at the top of the organization. For the first time in this organization, managers and other specialists at various organizational levels have been invited to partake in the new bottom-up strategy format Think Tank. The goals of the Think Tank are to identify the needs of the employees, to find and show potential, create a subculture and encourage innovation. The Think Tank meetings are attended by highly motivated employees who want to develop further organizational goals. The investigation illustrates that exchange on an equal basis, voluntary participation and mixed teams form the foundation for planned emergence strategy meetings. The interactions within the groups are characterized by participants having a positive attitude and avoiding negatively connoted behavior. In the strategy meetings, the various organizational members are enabled to join forces and contribute to strategic renewal. Strategic renewal is essential in a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex world. This chapter illustrates how meetings can facilitate strategic renewal through planned emergence.
Keywords: Meetings; emergent strategy; planned emergence; strategic renewal; case study; interaction analysis
... There are various purposes for a meeting to be implemented in an organization, but most importantly it is a method of completing an urgent task or problem; communicate and disseminate new information, ideas or important plans to members of the organization simultaneously; make important decisions or mandates about the organization and plan a strategy or principle related to the program or activity to get new ideas to carry out such activities; create consistency in action and meetings are held for auditing purposes. Hence, meetings can generate new ideas, make decisions easy, build team spirit, enhance socialization and provide platforms for sharing of views (Briggs and Vreede, 1997). ...
... Many studies (Briggs & Vreede, 1997 Respect for the meeting decisions made can be defined as showing respect for the decision even when in disagreement. In other words, no one is allowed to criticize the decision in a destructive manner after the meeting. ...
Meetings play a very important role in organizations as it is through meetings that issues are resolved, decisions are made, and voices are heard. During meetings, people need to interact and exchange views before coming to a certain decision. Therefore, it is important for those organizing and attending meetings to be able to show respect to each other and so respect the decision outcomes. This study investigates the parameters for members of an organization to respect the decisions made in meetings. It gathers information from previous studies to be used to create the dimensions that helped to develop the questionnaire. The theoretical background applied encompass the Islamic theory of mutual consultations. The research setting is based on education institutions located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq while the attendees of the meetings comprise 200 participants from private education institutions of Gulen Movement in the region. Their responses were analyzed through the IBM SPSS and IBM AMOS Software. Results showed that mutual consultation in Islam is divided into three periods as pre-meeting, in-meeting, and post meeting and it was observed that pre-meeting procedures (intention and competence) directly effect in-meeting procedures (patience, responsibility, and coherence) and consequently in-meeting procedures have direct impact on the post-meeting procedures (respect to meeting decisions). Further, pre-meeting and in-meeting procedures explained 63.5 percent of overall variance on respect to meeting decisions. This study contributes to the practical and theoretical knowledge of meetings literature whereby practitioners can use the outcome to design better meetings which are also respected by the attendees.
... Because H1, indicating that motivations for using Facebook for political reasons are stronger than those for using political blogs, was not supported, we suggest that future research employ the measuring construct of user satisfaction. In addition, previous studies have decomposed user satisfaction into two separate levels: process satisfaction and outcome satisfaction ( Briggs and de Vreede, 1997;Reinig, 2003;Tang et al., 2013). Process satisfaction is defined as a person's affective arousal toward the procedures in the communication process, whereas outcome satisfaction refers to a person's affective arousal toward the outcome of the communication process. ...
... In America, meetings consume 30-80 percent of managers' daily time. A Fortune 50 company reported a loss of $75 million due to poorly managed meetings (Briggs and Vreede, 1997). In the Caribbean, executives have in the past spent more time in meetings of which 35 percent was surveyed to be unproductive (Sayed et al., 1997). ...
... Greta (2006) emphasized that organizational meetings should have consistent form and be structured. Meetings generate new ideas, facilitate decision making, build teams, enhance socialization and provide a platform to share visions (Briggs and Vreede, 1997). In management, organizational problems are complex that no individual can go it alone and thus meetings garner acceptance and are a group reality check point while building synergy. ...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the management and benefits of meetings so as to draw conclusions on their effectiveness in organizations given the increasing discontent about their set up.
Design/methodology/approach
– The study was a cross-sectional survey, data were collected from 325 respondents in 22 service organizations in Kampala, using a questionnaire and participant observations; the instrument was tested for reliability and analysis done using descriptive and statistical techniques.
Findings
– The key finding was that policy regarding meetings and reasons for convening them jointly account for 57 percent variations in the benefits organizations have. The way meetings are conducted was found to have no significant effect, contrary to anecdotal evidences. The internal and external contextual factors did not affect the effectiveness of meetings. In general meetings have benefited organizations but the discontent on how they are managed is still high.
Research limitations/implications
– The lack of analytical and local literature on the study variables limited this study. There were also methodological challenges especially operationalization of variables, sampling and choice of respondents.
Practical implications
– The study underpins policy as a key factor for effectiveness of meetings; the literature supported this account. For governance boards there is need to review policy on meetings; and for managers, the paper emphasizes the need for improving how meetings are convened, conducted and the follow up action. The study has provided rich ground for scholars; the authors have extended the debate on meetings, brought into view an African context and made it possible for further studies.
Social implications
– Meetings involve many people in the organization and affect entire operations. There are critical personal factors that are pertinent in the outcome of meetings. The finding that personal factors do not have a significant relationship with effectiveness of meetings should not be applauded till further investigations and conceptualization is done in similar contexts. There are social implications on if meetings are not managed well as the authors have established like time wastage, employee motivation and poor management among others.
Originality/value
– Many papers that the authors accessed on meetings were on organizational experiences from western countries, the authors have made an original focus on Uganda and underpinned the debate on management development in Africa. The authors have also examined and provided an empirical basis for understanding effectiveness of meetings using key factors of policy, preparation, conduct and contextual factors.
... In America, meetings consume 30-80 percent of managers' daily time. A Fortune 50 company reported a loss of $75 million due to poorly managed meetings (Briggs and Vreede, 1997). In the Caribbean, executives have in the past spent more time in meetings of which 35 percent was surveyed to be unproductive (Sayed et al., 1997). ...
... Greta (2006) emphasized that organizational meetings should have consistent form and be structured. Meetings generate new ideas, facilitate decision making, build teams, enhance socialization and provide a platform to share visions (Briggs and Vreede, 1997). In management, organizational problems are complex that no individual can go it alone and thus meetings garner acceptance and are a group reality check point while building synergy. ...
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the management and benefits of meetings so as to
draw conclusions on their effectiveness in organizations given the increasing discontent about their set up.
Design/methodology/approach – The study was a cross-sectional survey, data were collected from
325 respondents in 22 service organizations in Kampala, using a questionnaire and participant observations;
the instrument was tested for reliability and analysis done using descriptive and statistical techniques.
Findings – The key finding was that policy regarding meetings and reasons for convening them
jointly account for 57 percent variations in the benefits organizations have. The way meetings are
conducted was found to have no significant effect, contrary to anecdotal evidences. The internal and
external contextual factors did not affect the effectiveness of meetings. In general meetings have
benefited organizations but the discontent on how they are managed is still high.
Research limitations/implications – The lack of analytical and local literature on the study
variables limited this study. There were also methodological challenges especially operationalization of
variables, sampling and choice of respondents.
Practical implications – The study underpins policy as a key factor for effectiveness of meetings; the
literature supported this account. For governance boards there is need to review policy on meetings; and
for managers, the paper emphasizes the need for improving how meetings are convened, conducted and
the follow up action. The study has provided rich ground for scholars; the authors have extended the
debate on meetings, brought into view an African context and made it possible for further studies.
Social implications – Meetings involve many people in the organization and affect entire operations.
There are critical personal factors that are pertinent in the outcome of meetings. The finding that
personal factors do not have a significant relationship with effectiveness of meetings should not be
applauded till further investigations and conceptualization is done in similar contexts. There are social
implications on if meetings are not managed well as the authors have established like time wastage,
employee motivation and poor management among others.
Originality/value – Many papers that the authors accessedon meetings were on organizational
experiences from western countries, the authors have made an original focus on Uganda and
underpinned the debate on management development in Africa. The authors have also examined and
provided an empirical basis for understanding effectiveness of meetings using key factors of policy,
preparation, conduct and contextual factors.
Keywords Africa, Decision making, Uganda, Management, Meetings, Pretended agreement
Paper type Research paper
... We were not interested in the content of the box,Technology, socio attitudes, individuals' characteristics, meeting environments, meeting process attributes, and meeting outcomes Davidson, 1997, p.165[26]Meeting design characteristics: agenda use, quality of facilitation, chairperson, punctuality, meeting size, and attendee involvement. Attendees' perceptions of meeting effectiveness.Leach et al., 2009, p.76[27]Facilitation, room layout, group size, and cultureBriggs & De Vreede, 1997p.113[28]Effectiveness of design reviews Speech, textual, graphical, and gesture forms of communicationOstergaard et al., 2005, p.174[29]Design meeting activities: issue, alternative, criterion, project management, meeting management, summary, clarification, digression, goal, and walkthroughOlson et al., 1992, p.356[30]Communication acts according to Bales' IPA, successful/unsuccessful group outcomes Gorse, 2002[31]Brainstorming rules and social interaction rules Matthews, 2009, p.67[32]Social transactions: design values (form, material, esthetic, uniqueness, purity, solutions), human values (spiritual, respect, jealousy, family, religion, mourning, comfort, tradition), requirements (activities, spatial, physical, review), narrative (direct support, indirect support, process detail, justification, tangent), and process (communication, problem-solving) Le Dantec et al., 2009, p.125[33]Communication among team members (who speaks and how much, what people say, how they say it and to whom, their roles) Foley et al., 2005, p.24[34]Activities for meeting support (preparing for meeting, keeping track of meeting flow, responding to needs in the moment, developing a summary of results, communicating results, maintaining team continuity and momentum between meetings) and stages of conversation flows (establishing relationship, brainstorming, exploring possible plans, choosing an action plan, committing to results, resolving setbacks, acknowledging completions) Bennett, 1994, p.199[35]Facilitation (present or absent), recording method (flip chart or computer-aided recording), and output (number of ideas) Kramer, 2001, p.538[36]Model dimensions: type of communication, course of performance, working style, relationship between the nature of problems and the implications of solutions Sonnenburg, 2004[37]Clustering between diverging and converging Tassoul and Buijs, 2007[38]The workshop model: value development, different workshop agendas, and team buildingbut in the relationships between the input and the output[23]. SeeFig. ...
A building assignment is a complex task that demands collaborative working if added value is to be achieved for users and society.
The problem today is that the building object is a combination of design results, because the collaborative working is not well organized or well managed as a result of a lack of insight into relevant process variables.
This study used desk research and case study research to identify variables that have an active relationship with collaborative working in design meetings.
The variables that describe a design meeting were established by analyzing 37 meetings during the product and production design phases of a prototype of an industrial, flexible, and demountable building system.
The result of this study is that the variables “Aim of meeting,” “Control of meeting,” “Participants,” “Tools,” and “Outcomes” are a suitable set to describe successful collaborative working in design meetings.
... Further more, when all the stakeholders are represented in creative problem-solving activities, there is a better chance their interests will be accommodated in the solution. 12 To achieve mutually desired outcomes, organization stakeholders need to combine their efforts (collaborate). Collaboration Engineering is therefore defined by Ref. 1, as "an approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks, and deploying those designs for practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from professional facilitators". ...
... 9 That is, the process should not cause a high cognitive load of the practitioners, as they need to concentrate on the content of the domain and group dynamics. 12 Ref. 9, use the Technology Transition Model (TTM) (see Ref. 24) three constructs identified to describe cognitive load in the collaboration process perspective: Perceptual load (the ease of use of the process, that is, the amount of mental effort required to use the collaboration process); Conceptual load (the understandability, that is, the amount of effort required to understand what the collaboration process is supposed to do); Access load.(the availability of the technology as described in the TTM is referred to availability of resources, support, and information that practitioners need in the execution of a collaboration process). ...
Decision-making in organizations is guided by policies. Organizational policy-making is a complex process in which several
parties are involved, with multiple backgrounds, incompatible interests, and diverging areas of interest, yet they all have
to be brought together to produce an acceptable policy result. Therefore, we propose to use techniques from collaboration
engineering (CE) in this context. There is hardly any experience with CE in the field of organizational policy-making. In
order to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of CE in organizational policy-making, it is important to have a systematic
evaluation instrument. We distinguish between general and domain-specific indicators. Moreover, we consider measurement means
and operationalization tools, such that organizational policy-making stakeholders can apply our instrument in their own organization.
KeywordsCollaboration engineering–Collaborative organizational policy-making–Evaluation
