Every single day across the globe, an estimated one billion workplace meetings take place. For chief executive officers, these gatherings dominate the working calendar, consuming nearly three-quarters of their operational hours. For managers, the burden is similarly heavy, with the task of planning and steering sessions eating up the majority of their workdays. Across much of the industrialized world, meetings serve as both the foundational tempo and one of the most pervasive sources of frustration in modern professional life.
Yet despite the immense investment of time and human energy poured into these gatherings, organizations have historically known remarkably little about what they actually accomplish or how to structure them for genuine effectiveness. For decades, meetings remained an elusive, understudied aspect of organizational life. That dynamic, however, has shifted. Driven in part by the widespread archive of virtual video calls and digital collaboration logs, "meeting science" has rapidly evolved from a niche academic pursuit into a prominent specialization within organizational and social psychology.
A landmark synthesis published in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior by Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, alongside Steven Rogelberg and Jon Gray of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, reviews over three decades of research into modern meeting behavior. The authors note that meeting to talk fulfills fundamental human desires to connect, communicate, and cooperate—activities humans have conducted for millennia in caves, town squares, and marketplaces. In an organizational context, however, meeting scientists define their subject more specifically: gatherings of individuals structured around explicit goals or formal agendas.
As Kreamer realized during her doctoral studies, meetings offer an ideal lens through which to examine broad workplace dynamics, including leadership, teamwork, and interpersonal relationships. At their core, meetings represent a fundamental arena where social interaction and organizational structures intersect in real time.
To decode what makes these gatherings succeed or fail, meeting scientists primarily rely on two empirical approaches. The first involves traditional survey methodology, in which researchers ask employees to reflect retroactively on real or simulated meeting experiences. The second approach analyzes specific behavioral trends extracted directly from audio and video recordings of live sessions—a granular level of detail that Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, an industrial and organizational psychologist who directs the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg in Germany, describes as "where the music is."
In one study, Lehmann-Willenbrock and her colleagues analyzed video recordings of team meetings to evaluate how leadership communication influences group decision-making. The researchers discovered that when meeting leaders practiced respectful, attentive inquiry—asking questions and genuinely absorbing the responses—team performance measurably improved. Conversely, performance stalled when leaders asked questions merely as a formality without actively listening to their team’s input.
Leading with Listening
While many empirical findings in meeting science sound intuitive, researchers emphasize that everyday management practices frequently depart from these basic principles. A central theme throughout the scientific literature is the paramount importance of active listening, which requires leaders to offer thoughtful, constructive feedback rather than passive nods or silent acquiescence.
The shift toward virtual work environments has introduced specific hurdles to this dynamic. Lehmann-Willenbrock points out that because remote participants routine mute their microphones when not speaking, the organic verbal and non-verbal cues that signal active listening are frequently eliminated entirely.
Furthermore, the balance between speaking and listening strongly shapes how participants perceive a meeting’s success. Studies consistently show that meeting leaders and regular attendees leave the same session with markedly different impressions. Because leaders typically dominate the talking time, they tend to rate their own meetings as highly productive, whereas subordinate attendees view them far less favorably. To correct this imbalance, Kreamer stresses that leaders must facilitate discussions without monopolizing them, actively monitoring their own speaking time to ensure a broader spectrum of voices can contribute.
