Stress Experiences and Appraisals Influence Global Perspectives on Meeting Satisfaction Presenter: Emily Adams Advisor: Joseph Allen Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Why Meetings? So first of all, a question I often have to answer is “why study meetings?” Most people have preconceived notions about meetings: what they are, how they should run, and how there should generally be fewer of them in their lives. It may not be uncommon for a fellow meeting attendee or two to be napping during the meetings, and indeed, even friends who ask about my research automatically fall asleep when I tell them about meetings. As Industrial/Organizational Psychologists, we study the good, the bad, and the ugly about workplaces. Meetings are an increasingly common component to most modern jobs, so it’s important to study them so we can understand them better in hopes of improving the day-to-day experiences of employees and the overall functioning of the organizations they work for.

Meetings 3 or more people gathered for work-related topic (Leach, Rogelberg, Warr, & Burnfield, 2009; Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock, & Rogelberg, 2015) Employees spend 6-20 hours weekly in meetings (Rogelberg, Scott, & Kello, 2007) Agendas universally good (Cohen, Rogelberg, Allen, & Luong, 2011) Participation required for success (Nixon & Littlepage, 1992)

Meetings: A Matter of Perspective Meeting leader blind spot (Kello, 2015) Latecomers (Mroz & Allen, 2017) Counterproductive meeting behaviors (Yoerger, Crowe, Allen, & Jones, 2017) Feelings about meetings overall (Allen, Sands, Mueller, Frear, Mudd, & Rogelberg, 2012) Research has shown that even people sitting in the exact same meeting may come out of the meeting having had very different experiences.

Challenge-hindrance Model of Stress Challenges: can be overcome, result in a sense of achievement (Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, & Boudreau, 2000) Hindrances: insurmountable roadblocks (Cavanaugh, et al., 2000) Having control over your work and social supports available may mitigate the negative effects of hindrances Recently, a trend toward appraisal of demands (Webster, Beehr, & Love, 2011) Borrowing from the Occupational Health Psychology literature, a well-established theory of stress that can help us understand these differences in how people experience meetings is the challenge-hindrance model of occupational stress.

Hypotheses The relationship between experiences of meeting-related demands and overall meeting satisfaction will be moderated by (H1) challenge appraisal (H2) hindrance appraisal of the demands, such that those who rate the demands as most (H1) challenging will have the most favorable (H2) hindering will have the least favorable global perceptions of meeting satisfaction

Method Online study using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 492) Provided feelings about meetings in general: Meeting Satisfaction (Rogelberg, Allen, Shanock, Scott, and Shuffler, 2010) Rated meeting stressors: Workload Demands Scale (adapted from Remondet & Hansson, 1991) Frequency: how often you experienced this Challenge: can help you meet your goal, somewhat stressful, motivating Hindrance: interferes with your work, road block, impossible to overcome Example item: I have been forced to attend meetings for a coworker in addition to attending my own meetings.

Results: Challenge Appraisal (H1) F(3, 489) = 10.60, p < .001 ΔR2 = .01 β = -.11, B = -.11 t(489) = -2.24, p < .05 95% CI [-0.20, -0.01]

Results: Hindrance Appraisal (H2) F(3, 489) = 13.58, p < .001 ΔR2 = .02 β = -.14, B = -.13 t(489) = -2.80, p < .01 95% CI [-0.22, -0.04]

Discussion Challenge appraisals were not expected: prior literature suggests the presence of challenge demands have positive effects Hindrance appraisals were as expected Regardless of whether a demand is considered a challenge or a hindrance, if the employee experiences a lot of it, it negatively impacts their perceptions of meetings

Questions Thank you to The Office of Research and Creative Activity for funding this research through the Graduate Research and Creative Activity grant Dr. Joseph Allen for advising me during this project CME Members for their advice throughout the project: Isaac Lindquist, Nicole Landowski, and Joseph Mroz