- New research claims meetings are considered successful when all participants experience a balance of speaking and listening
- Meetings are defined in the research as a gathering with a goal or structure
- Over three decades of meeting science has been reveiwed for the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
A new in-depth review of the science of meetings shows that listening trumps talking when getting together to discuss matters at work – and perhaps that bosses should talk less.
The 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior comprises over three decades of meeting science, a growing field among social psychologists. With a growing archive of meeting data available thanks to better written recording and online meeting calls, the review also found that meetings that are going nowhere should be abandoned.
Assembled by a team of researchers who all contributed, the review has uncovered some home truths for meeting leaders and bosses: that just because they think it went well doesn’t mean it actually did.
The meeting doom
Everyone has their experiences of meetings that seem to go nowhere, or endless meander around a point that has already been decided or discarded.
Perhaps the worst type of meeting (aside from redundancy announcements) is the one where employees are subjected to a life-story from the team leader or supervisor, who explains at length how they’re great friends with the owner, and can embellish any answer with an irrelevant, self-congratulatory anecdote.
Whatever the challenges presented by meetings that seem to go nowhere, technology could finally he here to help. Thanks to improved minuting and recording of team huddles and the storage of video conference calls, meeting science has an opportunity to show us how to conduct constructive, productive meetings that are memorable for the right reasons, rather than forgettable.
Ending meeting domination
Among the report's contributors was industrial and organizational psychologist Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, who states, “Often, leaders talk the most, which is also why they often think their meetings are pretty good.”
The director of the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg, Germany, adds that meetings need structure so that all attending feel they can contribute. This can be facilitated with a warmup phase. “For more introverted participants and more quiet participants, this warmup phase is really helpful because it helps them make more active contributions inside the meeting.”
Embracing recommendations from this review could improve the image of the team or departmental meeting. Structure, and aims, can help, as cognitive scientist Ava Scott of the University of Copenhagen notes. Lacking structure, she says, “makes a lot of meetings feel very purposeless.”
While that doesn’t necessarily mean the boss will stop talking, they might manage to make it less about them...