A Contextual Perspective on Gender and Negotiation

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Over the last two decades, there has been an upsurge in research in social psychology on the relationships among gender, cognition, and social behavior. Over the same period, studies of gender in negotiation have declined. In contrast to the movement in social psychology from tests of gender as a personality variable to investigations of gender in context, the negotiation field has largely abandoned the gender variable as an inconsistent predictor of negotiator behavior or performance. In this research program, we argue that gender has mostly been treated as a static, decontextualized demographic variable in the negotiation literature, and that we have yet to understand the complex nature of gender as a labile yet influential psychological construct in negotiation. Our focus is on the situational factors and psychological processes that mediate the relationship between gender and negotiation. We thus begin to answer the questions "under what conditions and why does gender matter in negotiation?" We take as a central proposition in this research that gender effects are not invariant across situations; rather we emphasize that gender is a "context-dependent phenomenon." We investigate how contextual factors, such as the strength of the situation and the relevance and salience of gender to negotiator's roles or the type of resource being distributed, activate distinct gender-based expectations, cognitions, and behavior. In the first set of studies, we present preliminary laboratory evidence about the role the situational factors play in moderating gender differences in negotiation outcomes. We propose a series of new experiments to further explore these contextual moderators and importantly, to develop interventions that eliminate gender differences. Our goals in this research are to further illuminate the psychological mechanisms that cause gender to matter in negotiations and develop practical advice that can help women improve their negotiated outcomes. In the second set of studies, we turn our attention to a greatly understudied area - the initiation of negotiations. We develop a two-stage model of the decision to initiate a negotiation. Using data from a preliminary field study, we find that women are less likely to initiate negotiations and that the psychological process in our model help to explain the overall individual differences as well as gender differences in initiating negotiations. We propose a new field study and a series of laboratory experiments to further investigate the contextual moderators of gender differences in the initiation of negotiations.