Meeting load paradox: Balancing the benefits and burdens of work meetings

Abstract

Work meetings are a significant part of professional life and have increasingly become a vehicle for organizations to get work accomplished. Recently, virtual meetings have become a more prominent feature of employees’ work lives, and scholarly attention to the changing nature of work-meeting dynamics has increased in tandem. Unsurprisingly, these circumstances have increased the number of meetings individuals participate in and the number of mediums through which these meetings occur. In this article, we introduce the meeting load paradox: increased meetings allow employees to better contribute to their organizations while consuming more of their personal resources. As such, an increased meeting load is only effective up to a certain threshold. To demonstrate this empirically, we conducted a field study with 199 full-time employees, providing initial evidence of one manifestation of the meeting load paradox (i.e., meeting participation, engagement, and creative performance increase as meeting load increases curvilinearly, creating an inverted U-shape effect). We find that a virtual medium increases the curvilinear effect while employee conscientiousness flattens the curvilinear effect. We discuss the important implications of these findings and ways employees and managers can navigate the meeting load paradox to thrive amid the proliferation of workplace meetings.