Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees

Meetings are an integral part of organizational life; however, few empirical studies have systematically examined the phenomenon and its effects on employees. By likening work meetings to interruptions and daily hassles, the authors proposed that meeting load (i.e., frequency and time spent) can affect employee well-being. For a period of 1 week, participants maintained daily work diaries of their meetings as well as daily self-reports of their well-being. Using hierarchical linear modeling analyses, the authors found a significant positive relationship between number of meetings attended and daily fatigue as well as subjective workload (i.e., more meetings were associated with increased feelings of fatigue and workload). Meetings are an integral and pervasive experience of organizational life. As a forum in which employees communicate and coordinate the organization’s goals and objectives, the meeting is a vehicle for many activities, from problem solving to interdepartmental interactions. Given their utility, it is not surprising that meeting load (i.e., the frequency and length of meetings) has steadily surged in the last few decades (Mosvick & Nelson, 1987). Since a 1973 study by Mintzberg, which found that the majority of a manager’s typical workday (69%) was spent in meetings, more recent surveys have suggested that meeting loads are increasing. Mosvick and Nelson (1987), for example, reported that relative to the 1960s, the average executive participated in twice as many meetings in the 1980s. Tobia and Becker (1990), in a survey of 1,900 business leaders, found that almost 72 % of individuals currently spend mor