Inclusive Meeting Design and the Quality of Collective Decisions

Ingrid M. Nembhard

Inclusive Meeting Design and the Quality of Collective Decisions

Author(s)	Prof. Ingrid M. Nembhard
Country	United States
Abstract	Meetings are central sites of organizational coordination and collective decision making, yet bringing diverse individuals into the same discussion does not ensure that their knowledge, concerns, and alternative interpretations influence the eventual decision. Participation can be constrained by hierarchy, status differences, conversational dominance, psychological insecurity, agenda design, premature consensus, and the disproportionate discussion of information already shared by most members. This study conceptualizes inclusive meeting design as a deliberate organizational practice for structuring participation, information exchange, dissent, facilitation, and decision closure so that collective judgments can draw more effectively on distributed knowledge. The study integrates meeting-science research with psychological safety, information-sharing theory, diversity and information elaboration, minority influence, and collective-intelligence scholarship. Because no primary organizational dataset was provided, a transparent simulation-based explanatory design was adopted. A synthetic dataset of 300 hypothetical organizational teams was generated using inclusive meeting design, psychological safety, participation equity, information elaboration, and collective decision quality as seven-point constructs. The simulation produced a positive association between inclusive meeting design and collective decision quality (r = 0.696). Participation equity (r = 0.712) and information elaboration (r = 0.701) were also strongly related to decision quality. A multivariate model containing inclusive meeting design, participation equity, and information elaboration explained approximately 62.3% of the simulated variation in collective decision quality. Mean decision quality increased from 3.29 among very-low-inclusion meeting profiles to 5.29 among very-high-inclusion profiles. These numerical results are synthetic and do not represent evidence obtained from actual organizations. The study argues that inclusive meetings improve collective judgment not merely when everyone is permitted to speak, but when meeting architecture increases the probability that distinctive expertise, minority perspectives, uncertainties, and dissenting information are surfaced, examined, and meaningfully incorporated before decisions are finalized.
Keywords	inclusive meeting design, collective decision making, participation equity, psychological safety, information elaboration, employee voice, meeting science, team effectiveness
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 6, November-December 2023
Published On	2023-12-31

View / Download PDF File

About AJAMIR Fees & Payment Current Issue Publication Archive	Submit Research Paper Track Submission Status Publication Guidelines Publication Ethics Peer Review & Plagiarism	Join as a Reviewer Editors & Reviewers Reviewer Referral Program Get Reviewer Membership Certi.	Website/Journal Policies Usage Policy Content Policies Privacy Policy

Contact Us		+1-872-302-3851	editor@ajamir.com

American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Inclusive Meeting Design and the Quality of Collective Decisions

Share this