Culture-driven scripts for meetings: An integrative theoretical lens for studying workplace meetings

Abstract

The current research conceptualizes workplace meetings as socially embedded forms of organizing and proposes that cross-cultural comparisons of workplace meetings offer insights into differences in meeting structures and processes. This provides a deeper understanding of how meetings drive organizing in different cultural settings. Specifically, we build programmatic theory proposing cognitive and behavioral scripts as a promising theoretical lens through which to capture and integrate sociocultural influences on workplace meetings. We adapt Cramton et al.'s (2021) cultural coordination scripts formulation (consisting of the task setting, role structure, temporal structure, and cues) to develop an interpretive framework for workplace meeting processes that orients future research on cross-cultural meetings. We further integrate existing research on cross-cultural meeting differences to develop a generic prototype meeting script and two illustrative examples of culturally specific meeting scripts (for German and U.S.-American meetings) to demonstrate the practical usefulness and usability of this programmatic theory. Workplace meetings are used by organizations to maintain their overarching goals and purpose. They are an important, maybe the most important, tool through which members of the organization ensure its functioning and the pursuit of its purpose. The form of meetings and the processes involved in carrying out meetings are influenced by the cultural context(s) in which the meeting is held and the organization resides. Previous research has identified meeting characteristics and processes that differ across cultures. Comparisons of meeting structures and processes embedded in different cultural contexts can help researchers explore how variations in meeting characteristics contribute to organizing in organizations. This in turn allows researchers to better illuminate, explain, and guide the management of meetings to support their core goals and purpose. In the current paper, we propose a novel way of conceptualizing, capturing, and studying cross-cultural variations in meeting structures and processes, using the lens of cognitive and behavioral scripts. Scripts are cognitive structures that organize knowledge around how events typically unfold and provide prescriptions for the ways in which actors should interact over time to achieve coordinated action in a task situation. We employ Cramton et al.'s (2021) cultural coordination scripts formulation to create a definition of meeting scripts as well as prototype meeting scripts that can provide the foundation for future meetings research and for improved facilitation of cross-cultural meetings in organizations. Furthermore, we build an overarching, integrative theoretical framework for understanding cross-cultural meeting differences, which will guide future research endeavors into and theorizing about meetings in different cultural contexts.