1. Why Arriving Late to Meetings May Harm Workplace Relationships
Joseph E. Mroz, Nicole B. Landowski, & Joseph A. Allen
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Introduction
Method
Discussion
Of the nearly 11 million meetings that take place each day in the U.S. (Allen et al., 2008), approximately 4.1 million, or 37% start late (Rogelberg et al., 2014).
Lateness is a relatively unexplored topic in workplace meetings and may be identified through objective time-based criteria and contextual factors
Participants have reported greater negative responses when a person arrives 6 to 10 minutes late than when someone arrives 1 to 5 minutes late (Rogelberg et al., 2014)
The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model of underlying mechanisms for individuals’ negative responses to meeting lateness
Attribution Theory of Interpersonal Behavior as a Framework for Exploring Reactions
First, begins with an event (late meeting; Weiner, 1995, 2006, 2011)
Second, observer (meeting attendee) determines the underlying cause for the event relative to the actor (i.e., late due to lack of effort or lack of ability to be on time)
Once the observer identifies the cause, the nature of the cause informs the observer’s judgment of responsibility for the actor’s behavior – if responsible, the observer will experience a negative moral emotion (e.g., anger) and react in an anti-social manner
Conservation of Resources Theory and Meeting Lateness
May explain why individuals initiate a causal search in lateness situations (Hobfoll, 1989)
Stress arises when resources (i.e., time for work or feeling of goal accomplishment) are lost or threatened
Participants from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk) service (n = 299)
2 (causal controllability: uncontrollable or controllable) x 2 (lateness: 5 minutes or 15 minutes) between subjects design
Participants randomly assigned to read vignettes of someone arriving late to a meeting
Participants were asked to imagine themselves sitting in a conference room with their boss and five peers at 9:59 a.m. waiting to have a meeting that is scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. However, the meeting will not start until everyone shows up. A peer arrives either 5 minutes or 15 minutes late. In the controllable condition, the late arrival says they were late because they forgot when the meeting was supposed to start, and in the uncontrollable condition, the late arrival says that their boss assigned them an urgent work task that had to be completed before they went to the meeting.
Anger – indicated how angry, upset, mad, frustrated and aggravated (Wickens et al., 2011)
Punishment - series of negative consequences (give the person a poor performance review, pass the person over for a promotion, give the person little to no raise, assign the person undesirable work)
Manipulation checks – controllability and lateness
Overall, our findings suggest that meeting lateness is a sufficiently powerful social transgression to initiate the attribution process, and that the effect is strong enough to detect in a highly controlled experimental design (Weiner, 1995, 2006, 2011).
When a late meeting arrival offered a controllable reason for being late (e.g., they forgot when the meeting started), participants experienced anger and assigned more punishment than when the late arrival gave an uncontrollable excuse (e.g., their boss made them work on something urgent before the meeting).
Improves on existing attributional theory that did not account for the severity of a transgression.
Theoretical Implications
Common and seemingly inconsequential meeting behavior is a large enough social transgression to initiate the attribution process
Practical Implications
Managers should be concerned with negative consequences of meeting lateness and should stress the importance of meeting punctuality
Results
The manipulations were successful. Participants in the controllable condition scored significantly higher on the controllability scale than those in the uncontrollable condition, t(297) = 13.01, p < Similarly, participants in the 15-minute late condition perceived the actor as significantly later than participants in the 5-minute late condition, t(295) = 19.41, p < .001.
Hypotheses tested using structural equation modeling.
Most hypotheses supported (see Figure 1), but meeting importance did not moderate the effect of lateness on anger, and the relation between prosocial intentions and sympathy was not significant when accounting for evaluations.
Proposed model explained the data better than the original theoretical model developed by Weiner.
Accounting for the degree of the transgression significantly improved the model.
Figure 2. Results of original attributional model. Controllability was a manipulated, observed factor. N = 299. R2 displayed to top or bottom right of endogenous constructs. **p < .001.
Figure 1. Results of hypothesized attributional model. Underlined variables are manipulated, observed factors. N = 299. R2 displayed to top or bottom right of endogenous constructs. * p < .01. **p < .001.