A review of three decades of research finds bosses who talk most rate their own meetings best, while quieter teammates and better listening drive results.
A new review of more than three decades of meeting science says the boss should probably talk less. Leaders who dominate tend to think their meetings went well, while their teams often don't agree.
Researchers studying recorded meetings found teams did better when leaders asked questions and genuinely listened. Video calls make that harder, because people mute themselves and skip the small talk that helps quieter colleagues speak up.
Meetings aren't all bad. A study of workers in Norway linked more meeting time with faster pay growth and more on-the-job learning. Most of the research so far comes from Europe and North America, so researchers want more studies elsewhere.
The person who talks most in a meeting is usually the one who thinks it went best, and that person is usually the boss. That’s one of the clearest lessons from meeting science, a fast-growing research field that has just been pulled together in a major review of more than three decades of studies.
Why does it matter to you? Close to 1 billion meetings happen around the world every day, and chief executives spend nearly three-quarters of their working hours in them. If you sit through video calls that drift, overrun or feel like a monologue, the research offers practical, mostly free ways to fix them, whether you run the meeting or just attend.
Meeting science looks at gatherings that have a goal or some structure, not chats by the coffee machine. For a long time it was a small niche, because meetings were hard to observe. That has changed, largely thanks to technology: recorded video calls and saved transcripts now give researchers huge amounts of real meeting data.
The new review was written by organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, with Steven Rogelberg and Jon Gray of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. It appears in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.
Researchers use two main methods. One is surveys, asking people afterward how a real or simulated meeting went. The other is coding behavior straight from audio and video recordings: who speaks, for how long, who gets interrupted, and how people react. Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, who leads the Center for Better Work at the University of Hamburg in Germany, calls that second kind of data the most revealing.
Leaders and their teams often walk out of the same meeting with very different verdicts. Lehmann-Willenbrock says leaders tend to do most of the talking, and that is exactly why they often believe their meetings went well. The people who sat quietly may disagree.
Her team analyzed video-recorded meetings to see how a leader’s style affects group decisions. When leaders asked questions respectfully and actually paid attention to the answers, teams performed better. When leaders asked questions but didn’t really listen, that benefit disappeared.
Kreamer puts it simply: a leader should lead the discussion without dominating it, and keep an eye on how much of the airtime they are taking so other voices get in. That is where the headline finding comes from. The aim isn’t silence from the top, it’s room for everyone else.
Active listening means more than nodding along. It means giving real, thoughtful responses to what someone said. Researchers say virtual meetings have made this much harder, because most of us now mute ourselves whenever we aren’t speaking, so the small signs of listening vanish.
Video calls also tend to skip the small talk. Lehmann-Willenbrock’s studies of face-to-face meetings found that chatting before the start predicts how well the meeting goes, especially for introverted and quieter people, who then contribute more once the real discussion begins. Her suggestion for online teams is to make arriving early normal, or to spend the first few minutes on an informal check-in.
A separate study by Zofia Walters, a doctoral student working with Kreamer, looked at people with ADHD in virtual meetings. In findings not yet published, those participants reported more fatigue than their peers, especially when their camera stayed on for long stretches, and multitasking seemed to help some of them manage boredom.
Most of the fixes are cheap and easy to try:
Humor helps too, as long as it’s warm rather than cutting, and it works best when colleagues already know each other well.
Surprisingly, maybe. A recent study of thousands of workers in Norway, led by Harvard economist David Deming, found that people who spend more time in meetings tend to see faster wage growth and learn more on the job. One likely reason is that meetings put junior staff in the room with senior colleagues. The study only shows a link, not cause and effect, and its authors compared meetings to broccoli: widely disliked but probably good for you.
There’s a gap in the evidence, though. Kreamer notes that most meeting research comes from Europe and North America, and early cross-country work suggests expectations differ. People in the US and the Netherlands get far more annoyed by a late boss than people in China or Chile.
It’s a branch of organizational and social psychology that studies goal-driven meetings, often using recordings of real calls to see who talks, who listens and what works.
The research says leaders should guide without dominating. Leaders who asked questions and listened carefully got better team performance.
Start with a few minutes of informal chat, give every meeting a stated goal, and try silent brainstorming in a shared document.
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