Modeling Temporal Interaction Dynamics in Organizational Settings

Most workplace phenomena take place in dynamic social settings and emerge over time, and scholars have repeatedly called for more research into the temporal dynamics of organizational behavior. One reason for this persistent research gap could be that organizational scholars are not aware of the methodological advances that are available today for modeling temporal interactions and detecting behavioral patterns that emerge over time. To facilitate such awareness, this Methods Corner contribution provides a hands-on tutorial for capturing and quantifying temporal behavioral patterns and for leveraging rich interaction data in organizational settings. We provide an overview of different approaches and methodologies for examining temporal interaction patterns, along with detailed information about the type of data that needs to be gathered in order to apply each method as well as the analytical steps (and available software options) involved in each method. Specifically, we discuss and illustrate lag sequential analysis, pattern analysis, Statistical Discourse Analysis, and visualization methods for identifying temporal patterns in interaction data. We also provide key takeaways for integrating these methods more firmly in the field of organizational research and for moving interaction analytical research forward

Well, Now What Do We Do? Wait . . . : A Group Process Analysis of Meeting Lateness

Workplace meetings start late all the time for a number of reasons. When participants are kept waiting, this can be experienced as a drain of personal resources. In this article, we integrate perspectives from conservation of resources theory, individual goal setting, group problem solving, and temporal dynamics to derive predictions regarding individual attendees’ meeting experiences and behavioral group communication patterns under conditions of meeting lateness. We conducted an experiment using 32 student groups in which 16 groups started their meeting on time, while 16 started their meeting 10 minutes late. We found that late meetings were less satisfying than on time meetings. Using videotaped meeting interactions, we analyzed the group dynamics at the micro-level of conversational utterances. Controlling for meeting duration, groups in the lateness condition showed substantially less solution-focused communication overall, less idea elaboration, less in-depth problem descriptions, and fewer socioemotional support statements than groups who started on time. Furthermore, lag sequential analysis revealed distinctly different temporal communication patterns. We discuss research implications for understanding meeting experiences through a conservation of resources lens as well as practical implications for managing group communication processes in workplace meetings

Perceived group cohesion versus actual social structure: A study using social network analysis of egocentric Facebook networks

Research on group cohesion often relies on individual perceptions, which may not reflect the actual social structure of groups. This study draws on social network theory to examine the relationship between observable structural group characteristics and individual perceptions of group cohesion. Leveraging Facebook data, we extracted and partitioned the social networks of 109 participants into groups using a modularity algorithm. We then surveyed perceptions of cohesion, and computed group density and size using social network analysis. Out of six linear mixed effects models specified, a random intercept and fixed slope model with group size as a predictor of perceived group cohesion emerged as best fitting. Whereas group density was not linked to perceived cohesion, size had a small negative effect on perceived cohesion, suggesting that people perceive smaller groups as more cohesive. We discuss the potential of social network analysis, visualization tools, and Facebook data for advancing research on groups

Our love/hate relationship with meetings: Relating good and bad meeting behaviors to meeting outcomes, engagement, and exhaustion

Purpose Employees at all organizational levels spend large portions of their work lives in meetings, many of which are not effective. Previous process-analytical research has identified counterproductive communication patterns to help explain why many meetings go wrong. This study aims to illustrate the ways in which counterproductive – and productive – meeting behaviors are related to individual work engagement and emotional exhaustion. Design/methodology/approach The authors built a new research-based survey tool for measuring counterproductive meeting behaviors. An online sample of working adults (N = 440) was recruited to test the factor structure of this new survey and to examine the relationships between both good and bad meeting behaviors and employee attitudes beyond the meeting context. Findings Using structural equation modeling, this study found that counterproductive meeting behaviors were linked to decreased employee engagement and increased emotional exhaustion, whereas good meeting behaviors were linked to increased engagement and decreased emotional exhaustion. These relationships were mediated via individual meeting satisfaction and perceived meeting effectiveness. Research limitations/implications The study findings provide a nuanced view of meeting outcomes by showing that the behaviors that people observe in their meetings connect not only to meeting satisfaction and effectiveness but also to important workplace attitudes (i.e. employee engagement and emotional exhaustion). In other words, managers and meeting leaders need to be mindful of behavior in meetings, seek ways to mitigate poor behavior and seek opportunities to reward and encourage citizenship behavior. Originality/value This study shows how good and bad meeting behaviors relate to employee perceptions of meeting effectiveness and individual job attitudes. The authors develop a science-based, practitioner-friendly new survey tool for observing counterproductive meeting behavior and offer a juxtaposition of good and bad meeting behaviors in a single model

Meetings as a positive boost? How and when meeting satisfaction impacts employee empowerment

Meetings constitute an important context for understanding organizational behavior and employee attitudes. Employees spend ever-increasing time in meetings and often complain about their meetings. In contrast, we explore the positive side of meetings and argue that satisfying meetings can empower rather than deplete individual employees. We gathered time-lagged data from an online sample of working adults in the U.S. As hypothesized, meeting satisfaction predicted employee empowerment, and information availability partially mediated this effect. Moreover, we found that these effects were stronger when employees participated in more meetings: Meeting demands moderated the link between meeting satisfaction and information availability as well as the positive, indirect effect of meeting satisfaction (through information availability) on psychological empowerment. Our findings underscore the relevance of workplace meetings for managing and promoting positive employee attitudes. We discuss implications for meeting science and the value of satisfying meetings as a managerial tool for promoting empowerment

Linking Pre-meeting Communication to Meeting Effectiveness

Purpose – This study investigates the importance of communication that occurs just before workplace meetings (i.e., pre-meeting talk). We explore how four specific types of pre-meeting talk (small talk, work talk, meeting preparatory talk, and shop talk) impact participants\u27 experiences of meeting effectiveness. Moreover, we investigate the role of participants’ personality in the link between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained using an online survey of working adults (N = 252). Because pre-meeting talk has not been studied previously, a new survey measure of meeting talk was developed. Findings – Pre-meeting small talk was a significant predictor of meeting effectiveness, even while considering good meeting procedures. Extraversion was identified as a moderator in this context, such that the relationship between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness was stronger for less extraverted participants. Research limitations/implications – Our findings provide the first empirical support for the ripple effect, in terms of meetings producing pre-meeting talk, and suggest that pre-meeting talk meaningfully impact employees\u27 meeting experiences and perceptions of meeting effectiveness. To address limitations inherent in the cross-section correlational design of the study, future research should experimentally test whether pre-meeting talk actually causes changes in meeting processes and outcomes. Practical implications – Managers should encourage their employees to arrive in time to participate in pre-meeting talk. Side conversations before a scheduled meeting starts can have beneficial effects for meeting outcomes and should be fostered. Originality/value – There is very limited research on the role of pre-meeting talk. We identify that small talk is a predictor of meeting effectiveness even after considering previously studied good meeting procedures

A Sequential Analysis of Procedural Communication in Organizational Meetings: How Teams Facilitate Their Meetings

How do teams facilitate their own meetings? Unmanaged (or free) social interaction often leads to poor decision-making, unnecessary conformity, social loafing, and ineffective communication processes, practices, and products. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential benefits of procedural communication in team meetings. The role of procedural communication, defined as verbal behaviors that structure group discussion to facilitate goal accomplishment, was examined in 59 team meetings from 19 organizations. Meeting behaviors were videotaped and coded. Lag sequential analysis revealed that procedural meeting behaviors are sustained by supporting statements within the team interaction process. They promote proactive communication (e.g., who will do what and when) and significantly inhibit dysfunctional meeting behaviors (e.g., losing the train of thought, criticizing others, and complaining). These patterns were found both at lag1 and lag2. Furthermore, the more evenly distributed procedural meeting behaviors were across team members, the more team members were satisfied with their discussion processes and outcomes. For practice, these findings suggest that managers should encourage procedural communication to enhance meeting effectiveness, and team members should share the responsibility of procedurally facilitating their meetings

In-the-wild Speech Emotion Conversion Using Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations and Neural Vocoder-based Resynthesis

Speech emotion conversion aims to convert the expressed emotion of a spoken utterance to a target emotion while preserving the lexical information and the speaker's identity. In this work, we specifically focus on in-the-wild emotion conversion where parallel data does not exist, and the problem of disentangling lexical, speaker, and emotion information arises. In this paper, we introduce a methodology that uses self-supervised networks to disentangle the lexical, speaker, and emotional content of the utterance, and subsequently uses a HiFiGAN vocoder to resynthesise the disentangled representations to a speech signal of the targeted emotion. For better representation and to achieve emotion intensity control, we specifically focus on the aro\-usal dimension of continuous representations, as opposed to performing emotion conversion on categorical representations. We test our methodology on the large in-the-wild MSP-Podcast dataset. Results reveal that the proposed approach is aptly conditioned on the emotional content of input speech and is capable of synthesising natural-sounding speech for a target emotion. Results further reveal that the methodology better synthesises speech for mid-scale arousal (2 to 6) than for extreme arousal (1 and 7).Comment: Submitted to 15th ITG Conference on Speech Communicatio

End-to-End Label Uncertainty Modeling in Speech Emotion Recognition using Bayesian Neural Networks and Label Distribution Learning

To train machine learning algorithms to predict emotional expressions in terms of arousal and valence, annotated datasets are needed. However, as different people perceive others' emotional expressions differently, their annotations are per se subjective. For this, annotations are typically collected from multiple annotators and averaged to obtain ground-truth labels. However, when exclusively trained on this averaged ground-truth, the trained network is agnostic to the inherent subjectivity in emotional expressions. In this work, we therefore propose an end-to-end Bayesian neural network capable of being trained on a distribution of labels to also capture the subjectivity-based label uncertainty. Instead of a Gaussian, we model the label distribution using Student's t-distribution, which also accounts for the number of annotations. We derive the corresponding Kullback-Leibler divergence loss and use it to train an estimator for the distribution of labels, from which the mean and uncertainty can be inferred. We validate the proposed method using two in-the-wild datasets. We show that the proposed t-distribution based approach achieves state-of-the-art uncertainty modeling results in speech emotion recognition, and also consistent results in cross-corpora evaluations. Furthermore, analyses reveal that the advantage of a t-distribution over a Gaussian grows with increasing inter-annotator correlation and a decreasing number of annotators.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.1213

What happens before a meeting? – Small Talk steigert die Meetingeffektivität

Research question: We explore how pre-meeting small talk impacts meeting effectiveness through the” ripple effect”, allowing before meeting communication/behaviors to ripple into and impact the scheduled meeting. Methodology: Data was obtained using an online survey of working adults (N = 252). A new survey measure of meeting talk was developed. Practical implications: Managers should encourage their employees to arrive in time so that they can engage in pre-meeting talk. Small talk before a scheduled meeting can have beneficial effects for the effectiveness of the meeting