Business Meetings Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Background: Past research has established the importance of discursive leadership in professional communication, but it has not systematically examined how conformity behaviors emerge as a potentially undesirable consequence of discursive leadership. Literature review: Review of the literature on the centrality of communication in leadership processes and conformity behavior suggest a void of analytic tools to adequately examine the negative consequences of discursive leadership. Research question: Are later interlocutors more likely to speak similarly to earlier ones if the earlier interlocutors occupy a more central position in the conversation network? Methodology: Based on 32,000 words of a transcribed meeting corpus, we measured conformity behaviors using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency scores, which are widely used in the information retrieval setting. We also operationalized the strength of discursive leadership as a positional centrality measure in the conversation network using a matrix algebra approach in social network analysis. Results: Findings support the hypothesis that discursive leadership is associated with conformity in language aligned toward discursive leaders' opinions. Conclusions: This study makes theoretical advances in understanding leadership construction and conformity behaviors between leaders and followers using empirical, authentic meeting data. We also give business people an applied understanding of the process of discursive leadership, which may help them to improve communication efficacy in their organizations by reducing overly conforming behaviors. We recommend that future research include more diverse participants and be combined with a survey to supplement the conversation data.

- by and +1
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- Conformity, Business Meetings, Discursive Leadership, Social Network Analysis

This research examined the full range of tasks and activities that design engineers perform, how their working time is distributed among these, and how these issues influence their satisfaction with their work. Seventy-eight design engineers each carried a personal digital assistant (PDA) for twenty working days. Once every hour, they entered data into their PDAs concerning their current work tasks and satisfaction levels, using a work sampling approach. Work tasks were explored from multiple perspectives, yielding highly extensive and detailed results. A key finding was that design engineers' work involves considerable technical engineering work (62.92% of time) and socially collaborative work (40.37% of time). The results were discussed in terms of their implications for academic theory and organizational practice.

This dissertation investigates how participants in German business meetings collaborate to talk this speech exchange system into existence. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the study describes how participants in meetings... more

- by Tobias Barske
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- Conversation Analysis, German, Social Roles, Business Meetings

This paper explores the value of using embedding to extend the notion of first exposure learning in flipped classroom practices. It describes a preclass assignment for a meeting and negotiation skills course, in which students are instructed to observe an authentic business meeting, interview participants of the meeting, photograph the board room, draw a sketch of the seating arrangement, and write a reflective account. Its main argument is that immersion in corporate culture before class makes business communication training not only more authentic, but also produces richer in-class discussions, ultimately leading to a level of metacognition associated with deep learning.

- by Ellen Van Praet
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- Linguistic ethnography, Flipped Classroom, Business Meetings

- by Bertha Du-Babcock
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- Information Systems, Conformity, Business Meetings, Discursive Leadership

In this paper we examine the dynamics of problem-solving as emergent and situated in interaction. We focus on the ways in which interactants negotiate their professional roles during the course of the business meeting event. We zoom in on the processes of formulating, negotiating and ratifying an issue as a problem and we argue that individuals negotiate their stances in relation to their perceived/projected professional roles. The processes of problem-solving are, simultaneously, processes of self/other positioning. We take an Interactional Sociolinguistic perspective and draw on audio-recorded meeting talk collected in a multinational corporate workplace. Our analysis shows that interactants draw on issues of accountability, perceived/projected responsibilities and expertise in pursuit of their own interactional agenda in the problem-solving meeting. We close the paper with directions for further research.

Background: Past research has established the importance of discursive leadership in professional communication, but it has not systematically examined how conformity behaviors emerge as a potentially undesirable consequence of discursive leadership. Literature review: Review of the literature on the centrality of communication in leadership processes and conformity behavior suggest a void of analytic tools to adequately examine the negative consequences of discursive leadership. Research question: Are later interlocutors more likely to speak similarly to earlier ones if the earlier interlocutors occupy a more central position in the conversation network? Methodology: Based on 32,000 words of a transcribed meeting corpus, we measured conformity behaviors using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency scores, which are widely used in the information retrieval setting. We also operationalized the strength of discursive leadership as a positional centrality measure in the conversation network using a matrix algebra approach in social network analysis. Results: Findings support the hypothesis that discursive leadership is associated with conformity in language aligned toward discursive leaders’ opinions. Conclusions: This study makes theoretical advances in understanding leadership construction and conformity behaviors between leaders and followers using empirical, authentic meeting data. We also give business people an applied understanding of the process of discursive leadership, which may help them to improve communication efficacy in their organizations by reducing overly conforming behaviors. We recommend that future research include more diverse participants and be combined with a survey to supplement the conversation data.

- by hyejung chang
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- Information Systems, Psychology, Computer Science, Conformity

Business meetings are superficially alike all over the world. Yet under the surface they show fundamental discursive differences that align with the specific cultures in which they occur (Aritz and Walker, 2014). A lack of awareness of these differences within the context of an intercultural meeting can potentially impact group rapport and meeting effectiveness. This paper compares the discursive behaviour of groups of Japanese English speakers and groups of native English speakers participating in decision-making meetings and concludes that there are notable and discordant differences across the two groups in terms how discourse is framed, how speaking turns are achieved and how conflict is resolved.