Negotiating gender roles: Gender differences in assertive negotiating are mediated by women’s fear of backlash and attenuated when negotiating on behalf of others.

Abstract

The authors propose that gender differences in negotiations reflect women's contextually contingent impression management strategies. They argue that the same behavior, bargaining assertively, is construed as congruent with female gender roles in some contexts yet incongruent in other contexts. Further, women take this contextual variation into account, adjusting their bargaining behavior to manage social impressions. A particularly important contextual variable is advocacy-whether bargaining on one's own behalf versus on another's behalf. In self-advocacy contexts, women anticipate that assertiveness will evoke incongruity evaluations, negative attributions, and subsequent "backlash"; hence, women hedge their assertiveness, using fewer competing tactics and obtaining lower outcomes. However, in other-advocacy contexts, women achieve better outcomes as they do not expect incongruity evaluations or engage in hedging. In a controlled laboratory experiment, the authors found that gender interacts with advocacy context in this way to determine negotiation style and outcomes. Additionally, process measures of anticipated attributions and backlash statistically mediated this interaction effect.

Competing for the benefit of offspring eliminates the gender gap in competitiveness

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A social-cognitive approach to understanding gender differences in negotiator ethics: The role of moral identity

“…Negotiations are a critical organizational context to understand. Beyond being a fundamental mechanism by which resources are divided, women face numerous hurdles in negotiations (Amanatullah & Morris, 2010;Bowles, Babcock, & McGinn, 2005;Kray, Kennedy, & Van Zant, 2014;Kray & Thompson, 2004;Kray, Thompson, & Galinsky, 2001;Tinsley, Cheldelin, Schneider, & Amanatullah, 2009). Additionally, negotiations are a masculine context (Bowles & Kray, 2013), in which men are expected to perform better than women (Kray et al, 2001), and poor performance relative to women can threaten men's sense of masculinity (Kray & Haselhuhn, 2012;Netchaeva, Kouchaki, & Sheppard, 2015).…”

Perspectives of female leaders on sense of coherence and mental health in an engineering environment

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