Constraints and Triggers: Situational Mechanics of Gender in Negotiation

Abstract

The authors propose two categories of situational moderators of gender in negotiation: situational ambiguity and gender triggers. Reducing the degree of situational ambiguity constrains the influence of gender on negotiation. Gender triggers prompt divergent behavioral responses as a function of gender. Field and lab studies (1 and 2) demonstrate that decreased ambiguity in the economic structure of a negotiation (structural ambiguity) reduces gender effects on negotiation performance. Study 3 shows representation role (negotiating for self or other) functions as a gender trigger by producing a greater effect on female than male negotiation performance. Study 4 shows decreased structural ambiguity constrains gender effects of representation role, suggesting situational ambiguity and gender triggers work in interaction to moderate gender effects on negotiation performance. Constraints and Triggers 3 Constraints and Triggers: Situational mechanics of gender in negotiationThe first major wave of research on gender in negotiation surged and subsided with trends in the psychological study of individual differences. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was an abundance of studies testing whether the sex of a negotiator would be a stable and reliable predictor of bargaining behavior and performance. Scholars who reviewed this literature reported an assortment of null and contradictory findings (Rubin & Brown, 1975;Thompson, 1990). By the early 1990s, most researchers in the field had discarded the gender variable with a heap of other individual differences that had failed over scores of tests to produce consistent results.The contradictions from this first wave of research on gender in negotiation became the puzzles motivating a second generation of investigation. Consistent with contemporary theories of gender and social behavior (Deaux & LaFrance, 1998;Deaux & Major, 1987;Kray, Galinsky, & Thompson, 2002;Maccoby, 1990), this next generation of researchers started with the premise that gender effects in negotiation would arise under certain circumstances and be absent-or even reversed-in others (Kray et al.,

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