Strategies Aimed at Reducing Gender Differences in Negotiation Are Perceived by Women as Ineffective
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Strategies Aimed at Reducing Gender Differences in Negotiation Are Perceived by Women as Ineffective Jens Mazei 1 & Marc Mertes 1 & Joachim Hüffmeier 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Women often fare worse in negotiations than men. Negotiation researchers, trainers, and policymakers thus aim to find solutions—such as specific strategies for female negotiators—to reduce gender differences in negotiations. However, if using such a specific strategy is not perceived to yield benefits (e.g., better economic outcomes) as well as to include risks (e.g., unfavorable social evaluations), women should naturally be unlikely to use it. Hence, we examined 218 German women’s perceptions of three specific strategies (i.e., using a relational account, feminine charm, and confrontation) and three conventional strategies (i.e., assertiveness, yielding, and neutral behavior) using a hypothetical negotiation vignette. We found that women expected all three specific strategies to be less economically effective than regular assertiveness, which led to their lower likelihood to project using all three specific strategies. Moreover, all three specific strategies were expected to lead to less favorable social evaluations than yielding. This expectation also explained women’s lower likelihood to use feminine charm than to yield. Taken together, the specific strategies were perceived as ineffective. Future negotiation research, thus, needs to ensure that the characteristics of specific strategies do not render them unappealing, and trainers and policymakers need to pay attention to potential implementation gaps resulting from the specific strategies’ perceived ineffectiveness. Keywords Sex . Sex roles . Gender . Gender gap . Negotiation . Bargaining
Gender differences in negotiations are seen as one important piece of the puzzle of longstanding gender inequalities in salaries and leadership positions (Kennedy and Kray 2015; Kulik and Olekalns 2012). Women are less likely than men to show effective negotiation behaviors (Stuhlmacher and Linnabery 2013; Walters et al. 1998), and others tend to evaluate women negatively for doing so (Amanatullah and Tinsley 2013; Bowles et al. 2007), each of which can result in lower negotiated salaries for women (Mazei et al. 2015; Stuhlmacher and Walters 1999). Against this backdrop, negotiation research explored specific strategies (e.g., a relational account; Bowles and Babcock 2013) that may affect how women fare Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01130-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jens Mazei [email protected] 1
TU Dortmund University, Emil-Figge-Straße 50, 44227 Dortmund, Germany
at the negotiation table relative to men (Kray et al. 2012). These endeavors are clearly promising because women’s economic negotiation outcomes and how they are evaluated by others can be improved by using certain specific strategies,
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