Previous research on gender in negotiations suggests that men outperform women in negotiations and attributes gender differences in negotiation outcomes to differences in men’s and women's’ negotiation behavior. Generally speaking, male negotiators are expected to use more aggressive and competitive behaviors that are congruent with an agentic stereotype, but female negotiators are expected to use more passive and accommodating behaviors associated with a communal stereotype. Furthermore, negotiators will risk a “backlash”, unfavorable social evaluations, when their behaviors deviate from their gender stereotype. In other words, if female negotiators adopt more aggressive and competitive behaviors to effectively negotiate for economic outcomes, the trade-off is to receive a negative social evaluation unless they represent another person in negotiations.
Given the disadvantages for women in negotiations, negotiation researchers suggest several strategies for women to overcome gender differences in negotiations. Among most-examined strategies, however, two strategies (i.e., using a relational account, feminine charm) tend to perpetuate gender stereotypes because of their conformity to gender roles. With regard to confrontation as a strategy, a strategy countering traditional beliefs about women, research results suggested that female negotiators who confronted a male counterpart with his female gender stereotype and negotiated assertively not only achieved better economic outcomes but also were evaluated more favorably than women who simply used agentic behaviors such as assertiveness. That is, gender differences in negotiations can be changed without compromising social evaluation.
The current study argues that negotiation research should explore more strategies that may help women to maximize both economic and social outcomes in negotiations. As Sheryl Sandberg suggests, women negotiators should “combine niceness with insistence,” a style that is also called as “relentlessly pleasant.” Fran Hauser, the author of The Myth of the Nice Girl, also argues that women can “be ambitious and likable”, “speak up assertively and nicely”, “make decisions firmly and collaboratively” and “negotiate with strategy and empathy”. In other words, there are ways by which women can use to achieve both instrumental and relational goals in negotiations even when they negotiate for themselves. Thus, this study aims to explore how women manage gender differences in negotiations with the Yin-Yang perspective by which a conflicting yet complementary dynamics between competition (i.e. yang) and cooperation (i.e. yin) has been endorsed.
Based upon in-depth interviews with 20 senior negotiators (M=10, F=10) who have at least ten years’ negotiating experience, this study examines whether women have demonstrated better negotiation adaptivity (i.e., the capacity to employ different bargaining strategies in accordance with the changes in negotiation situations) than men because women usually need behavioral flexibility to overcome gender stereotypes that place them at a disadvantage in negotiations. Specifically, the transcripts of interviews (about 400 pages) will be analyzed to identify the strategies (competition vs. cooperation vs.co-opetition) used in interviewees’ “successful” and “less successful” negotiations. The results of coding will be used to answer the following research questions:
RQ1: Compared to men, do women use more diversified strategies?
RQ2: Compared to less successful negotiations, do women use more diversified
strategies in successful negotiations?