Remember when people first started bringing laptops to meetings and how they often drew attention to the device rather than the meeting? Well those were halcyon days compared to the explosion of smartphone capability and tablets. Other than the distractions, is there any impact on the perceptions of the users by others in the meeting? Yes, says Maarten Bos of the Harvard Business School.
He conducted a study at Harvard to determine if power related behaviors are affected by the size of the device involved. The results indicate that expansive body postures lead to power-related behaviors, even in cases where the posture is incidentally induced by the size of the gadget or computer. Further study will be required to more fully test and develop his theories, but the corollary should be a caution to those using devices in meetings. Read the whole article here.