Because I fancy myself something of a student of how groups make decisions, during meetings I devote much of my time not to the agenda but to observing how the group is behaving. As the owner of three dogs over the years, I'm also necessarily something of a student of pack behavior and dominance rituals. Lately, I've been thinking about how the two lines of inquiry overlap. After all, effective boards of director meetings presumably promote effective corporate governance.
It is well-established that persons of higher stature within the group tend to talk more than persons of lower stature. Where the group is a new one, and status relations are undefined, however, the competition for speaking time becomes a critical part of the larger competition for dominance within the group. In turn, this leads to filibustering, cross-talk, and other dysfunctional behaviors that may prevent the meeting from accomplishing anything substantive.
You can usually identify the would-be alpha dogs pretty easily. They will start talking and simply not stop. Typically both their volume and speaking speed will be high. They will not meet anyone in the eye for an extended period and will ignore "I want to talk" body language. Anything said by anyone else will be immediately woven back into the filibustering speaker's line of argument, including express disagreement or even non sequiturs.
There are several ways of managing this sort of competition. One is to define a group hierarchy pre-meeting, perhaps by establishing a chairman as a presiding officer, who becomes the alpha dog by definition. An effective chairman can keep control of the agenda and keep the meeting on course. Unfortunately, just as a weak-minded owner invites his/her dog to compete for dominance, an ineffectual chairman can actually make the situation worse by inviting nominal subordinates to compete for control.
Alternatively, you can believe that people are not pack animals and hope to set up an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, consensus-building atmosphere. Personally, I don't believe it is possible to do so. Humans are pack animals. We are hard-wired by evolution to establish dominance relationships, which is probably one reason we were able to so successfully domesticate dogs. Studies of chimpanzees, for example, find that "high-ranking females were shown to have significantly higher infant survival, faster maturing daughters, and more rapid production of young." Our ancestors thus got a significant reproductive and genetic reward for successfully competing for dominance.
Competition for dominance, moreover, is arguably socially beneficial. Once a clear dominance hierarchy (pecking order) is established, aggression within the group becomes less likely, because less dominant individuals will not incur the high costs of challenging more dominant individuals. The resulting social stability facilitates subsequent cooperation between group members.
Hence, for effective meetings, it likely will be best if the group has a dominance hierarchy imposed on it from the outside at the outset or collectively establishes one at the earliest opportunity, so as to minimize the amount of time spent on non-constructive dominance rituals. (The benefits of such competition, after all, follow mainly from the establishment of the hierarchy rather than the competition itself.)
(Or, you can do what I often do, which is to slip out the back door and go for a drive.)
If I'm right about the way dominance rituals affect group decision making in meetings, it suggests that one function of the board of directors is providing a set of status equals for top managers. We know, for example, that higher status group members are more inclined to propound initiatives and exercise greater influence over the group’s ultimate decision. As such, corporate law’s insistence on the superiority of the board to management begins to make sense. To the extent law shapes social norms, admittedly a contested proposition, corporate law may empower the board to constrain top management more effectively by creating a de jure status relationship favoring the board.
