Constructing an "effective" meeting chair: an analysis of the discourse of meeting management

Abstract

Meetings are integral to the business world and many management handbooks have advised that an effective meeting chair is essential to effective meetings. These handbooks advise that the meeting chair should take charge of meeting management activities including, for example, opens and closes a meeting, sets and goes through the meeting agenda in order, and allocates and monitors speaking turns. However, previous studies on meeting talk reveal that the actual enactment of these activities is complex and challenging, involving a lot of negotiation amongst the chair and the other meeting participants. This paper further demonstrates that the activities can be even more challenging when the meeting chair is an inexperienced manager and when the company director (CEO) who sees himself as a coach to his employees is also present in the meetings and often comments on the manager’s meeting management skills. This paper investigates how an inexperienced manager struggles to construct or not to construct himself as a (competent) meeting chair in face of his CEO’s explicit and implicit criticism. It draws on 14 hours of video-/audio- recordings of authentic business meetings collected at a small company in Hong Kong and adopts a combination of conversation analysis, social constructionism, and the community of practice theory as its analytic tool. The analysis reveals that discrepant views on effective meeting management between the manager and the CEO, as well as participants’ orientation to meeting conventions can become sources of struggles to both the manager and the CEO. This study also demonstrates that the construction of a meeting chair identity is complex and involves collaboration and negotiation among meeting participants.