Times and turns in stimulating meetings

Authors: Ronald Böck

Abstract:

For human beings, it is a common habit to gather with other people in various situations. Regarding especially business meetings, usually a specific goal is intended which should be reflected in the meeting’s outcomes. Therefore, it seems to be assumedly easy to assess the success of a meeting, which is often linked to the effectiveness of an interaction. In contrast, Niebuhr et al. argue that meetings can be also of success for the interaction partners if they are perceived as being “stimulating”. This aspect is considered in the current manuscript, analysing the Parking Lot Corpus which comprises 70 group discussions with a distinct goal, allowing to apply various performance measures for the assessment of meetings. We focussed on the (perceived) mean meeting effectiveness, relating it to the total speech time and number of turns provided by the participants. Regarding the individual results of either the group leader or the remaining group members, we see a large variation in the meeting effectiveness, being independent from the meeting length. More detailed analyses of these relations support indications towards stimulating meetings in the sense of Niebuhr et al.