Meeting Scientists Say Quieter Leaders Run Better Meetings

How many meetings are happening, and why does it matter?

Close to 1 billion meetings take place around the world each day, and CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in them, according to reporting by Knowable Magazine published in Ars Technica. Planning and leading meetings also absorbs the largest share of managers' time, the outlet reported — a volume of activity large enough that researchers have started asking what, if anything, all that time produces.

What is "meeting science," and who studies it?

Meeting science is a growing specialization inside organizational and social psychology, according to the report. Organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology coauthored a review spanning more than three decades of meeting research in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, alongside Steven Rogelberg and Jon Gray of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Kreamer told Knowable that meetings function as a useful research setting for teamwork, leadership, and work relationships generally: "You can use a meeting as a stage to study anything you want," she said, framing meetings as, in the authors' words, "a fundamental aspect of how we organize and interact as social beings."

How do researchers actually measure what happens in meetings?

Two methods dominate the field, Knowable reported. The first is the classic retrospective survey, asking participants to recall and rate real or simulated meetings after the fact. The second is direct analysis of audio and video recordings — a technique industrial and organizational psychologist Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, director of the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg, described as "where the music is," since it captures behavior as it unfolds rather than as participants remember it.

What did the research find about talking less?

In one video-based study, Lehmann-Willenbrock and colleagues examined how a leader's communication style shaped team interaction during decision-making. Respectful, attentive inquiry by meeting leaders — asking real questions and listening to the answers — improved team performance, the researchers found, in contrast to leaders who asked questions in a more perfunctory way.

What should managers watch for going forward?

The field is expanding quickly as archived virtual meetings supply researchers with large volumes of behavioral data, according to Knowable, which should sharpen future findings on what separates a productive meeting from a wasted hour.

What to watch:

• Whether companies start auditing meeting load the way they audit other costs, given the hours CEOs and managers already spend in them.
• Further studies using recorded video and audio, rather than after-the-fact surveys, to pin down which leader behaviors actually move team performance.
• Tools built to let leaders listen rather than scribble notes — some teams already lean on AI note-taking assistants such as AlterEgo to free up attention during a meeting itself.
• Whether the 2026 Annual Review paper from Kreamer, Rogelberg, and Gray spurs more workplaces to treat meeting design as its own discipline rather than an afterthought.

By the numbers: nearly 1 billion meetings happen globally each day; CEOs spend close to three-quarters of their workdays in them, per the reporting cited above.