A Sequential Analysis of Procedural Meeting Communication: How Teams Facilitate Their Meetings

Abstract

How do teams facilitate their own meetings? Unmanaged (or free) social interaction often leads to poor decision-making, unnecessary conformity, social loafing, and ineffective communication processes, practices, and products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential benefits of procedural communication in team meetings. The role of procedural communication, defined as verbal behaviors that structure group discussion to facilitate goal accomplishment, was examined in 59 team meetings from 19 organizations. Meeting behaviors were videotaped and coded. Lag sequential analysis revealed that procedural meeting behaviors are sustained by supporting statements within the team interaction process. They promote proactive communication (e.g., who will do what and when) and significantly inhibit dysfunctional meeting behaviors (e.g., losing the train of thought, criticizing others, and complaining). These patterns were found both at lag1 and lag2. Furthermore, the more evenly distributed procedural meeting behaviors were across team members, the more team members were satisfied with their discussion processes and outcomes. For practice, these findings suggest that managers should encourage procedural communication to enhance meeting effectiveness, and team members should share the responsibility of procedurally facilitating their meetings.

Keywords:

• Interaction Analysis
• Lag Sequential Analysis
• Meeting Effectiveness
• Facilitation

Acknowledgments

The research reported in this article was supported by grants from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Social Fund. We are grateful to the deceased Renee A. Meyers for her valuable insights and would also like to thank our two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

[1] We recognize that unitizing typically requires two coders and reliability analysis using Guetzkow's U. When using software and live video to unitize data, however, units are marked according to time rather than words. Unitizing and coding was performed with INTERACT software, which allows cutting individual behavioral events directly from the video and assigning the speaker and behavioral code to it. It is not feasible for two unitizers to cut the videotape at the exact same nanosecond. Hence, units were identified by only one coder prior to the double-rating process for evaluating inter-rater reliability. We constructed very clear unitizing rules by specifying sense units consistent with Bales (1950) and by including specific behavioral examples for each code in the act4teams coding handbook. An English or German copy of the coding handbook can be obtained from the first author upon request.