Why Do We Hate Meetings at Work? An Investigation of the Factors that Lead to Meeting Hate

A quick Google search reveals over 50,000,000 hits that discuss, anecdotally, why employees hate meetings, how to improve meetings, and some of the downsides of hated meetings. Despite popular and academic focus on meetings, no empirical work has examined hate toward meetings. In this study, we took an exploratory approach and predicted that factors of meetings themselves (relevant, scheduled appropriately, start on-time, number of attendees, and general level of attendee participation), personality, and perceptions of the organization would influence how much individuals reported hated meetings in general. We found that meeting relevance, the degree to which someone participated in the meeting, how meetings were scheduled, and average number of attendees were negatively related to meeting hate. Interestingly, we also found that conscientiousness interacted with how permissible individuals believed it was to be late in their organizations on meeting hate. The positive effect of conscientiousness on meeting hate was much stronger when lateness climate was high compared to low. Overall, these findings suggest that hate toward meeting is affected by a variety of meeting-, person-, and organization-specific factors, and that additional work should attempt to explore the effects of hate toward meetings on employee job satisfaction, work engagement, or performance