Psychological Perspectives on Gender in Negotiation

A fundamental form of human interaction, negotiation is essential to the management of relationships, the coordination of paid and household labor, the distribution of resources, and the creation of economic value. Understanding the effects of gender on negotiation gives us important insights into how micro-level interactions contribute to larger social phenomena, such as gender gaps in pay and authority. Recent research on gender in negotiation has shown us how gender stereotypes constrain women from negotiating access to resources and opportunities through lowered performance expectations and gendered behavioral constraints. However, this widening research stream is also beginning to provide hints for how individuals and organizations can overcome these limitations to women’s negotiation potential. In this chapter, I provide a brief history of psychological research on gender in negotiation, starting with the study of gender-stereotypic personality attributions and transitioning to a more sophisticated analysis of the effects of gender stereotypes on negotiation behaviors and performance. I review contemporary research on gender in negotiation using two interrelated frameworks. The first outlines the ways in which gender stereotypes influence negotiation, the second outlines situational factors that help predict when gender effects are likely to emerge in negotiation. These include ambiguity, which facilitates the emergence of gender effects, and gender triggers, which influence the salience and relevance of gender within the negotiating context. Finally, I highlight practical implications of research on gender in negotiation and point to future research directions that could transform insights about barriers to women’s negotiation performance into positive levers for change

What Could A Leader Learn From A Mediator?: Dispute Resolution Strategies for Organizational Leadership

It is hard to imagine a leadership situation that is devoid of conflict or even what the function of leadership would be on an island of perpetual harmony where all parties shared a perfectly common vision of their objectives and how to achieve them. Many of leadership’s most important challenges are born of conflict— to build coalitions among divergent interests, forge consensus from discord, and transform destructive disagreement into constructive debates (Burns, 1978; Gardner, 1990; Selznick, 1957). We easily recognize effective leaders as expert negotiators as they confront and appeal to a multiplicity of interests to achieve their objectives (Lax & Sebenius, 1986; Neustadt, 1990; Raiffa, 1982). We less often recognize when leaders are acting as informal mediators or arbitrators of disputes. Yet, the activities of mediators and arbitrators overlap a great deal with the skills and responsibilities of leadership (Raiffa, 1983)

Claiming Authority: How Women Explain their Ascent to Top Business Leadership Positions

Career stories of 50 female executives from major corporations and high-growth entrepreneurial ventures suggest two alternative accounts of how women legitimize their claims to top leadership positions: navigating and pioneering. In navigating accounts, the women legitimized their claims to top authority positions by following well institutionalized paths of career advancement (e.g., high performance in line jobs) and self-advocating with the gatekeepers of the social hierarchy (e.g., bosses, investors). In pioneering accounts, the women articulated a strategic vision and cultivated a community of support and followership around their strategic ideas and leadership. The career stories suggested that, when the women’s authority claims were not validated, they engaged in narrative identity work to revise their aspirations and legitimization strategies. Sometimes narrative identity work motivated women to shift from one type of account to another, particularly from navigating to pioneering. Based on inductive analyses of these 50 career stories, I propose a process model of how women legitimize their claims to top leadership positions by recursively resetting career accounts as authority claims succeed or fail

Relational Accounts: An Answer for Women to the Compensation Negotiation Dilemma

Women face a compensation negotiation dilemma in which they have to weigh the economic benefits of asking for higher pay with the social risks of defying prescriptive sex stereotypes (Bowles, Babcock, & Lai, 2007). In four experiments, we show that enhancing the legitimacy of women's compensation requests does not eliminate the social risk of asking, and that eliminating the social risk of asking is not sufficient to legitimize their requests. We identify strategies for overcoming the compensation negotiation dilemma using "relational accounts" that simultaneously explain why the negotiating behavior is appropriate under the circumstances and affirm concern for organizational relationships.

Gender in Job Negotiations: A Two-Level Game

We propose a two-level-game (Putnam, 1988) perspective on gender in job negotiations. At Level 1, candidates negotiate with the employers. At Level 2, candidates negotiate with domestic partners. In order to illuminate the interplay between these two levels, we review literature from two separate bodies of literature. Research in psychology and organizational behavior on candidate-employer negotiations sheds light on the effects of gender on Level 1 negotiations. Research from economics and sociology on intra-household bargaining elucidates how negotiations over the allocation of domestic labor at Level 2 influence labor force participation at Level 1. In conclusion, we integrate practical implications from these two bodies of literature to propose a set of prescriptive suggestions for candidates to approach job negotiations as a two-level game and to minimize disadvantageous effects of gender on job negotiation outcomes.

Getting Past No: Gender and the Propensity to Persist in Negotiation

Gender stereotypes suggest that men will persist more in negotiation than women, particularly in mixed-gender pairs. In contrast, a gender-in-context perspective suggests that women will vary their persistence behavior more than men and become more rather than less persistent in mixed-gender pairs in order to resist male dominance in negotiation. Results of three studies support the gender-in-context perspective, showing that women vary the degree and quality of their persistence behavior more than men depending on their counterpart’s gender. Women became more persistent with male than female negotiating counterparts (Studies 1-3). Consistent with the proposition that women persist more with men than women out of resistance to stereotypical male dominance in negotiation, women relied on characteristically low-status forms of influence (more indirect than direct) when persisting with men but not women (Study 3) and women’s extra persistence with male counterparts helped them reduce the gender gap in negotiation performance (Study 3).

When Does Gender Matter in Negotiation?

We propose that two situational dimensions moderate gender effects in negotiation. Structural ambiguity refers to potential variation in a party’s perception of the bargaining range and appropriate standards for agreement. Gender triggers are situational factors that make gender salient and relevant to behavior or expectations. Based on a review of field and experimental data and social psychological theory on individual difference, we explain how structural ambiguity and gender triggers make negotiations ripe for gender effects.