Category Archives: Business Communication

Business Communication

Range Offers vs Point Offers for Better Negotiation Settlements

Daniel Ames

Many people avoid making negotiation offers as a range of values, because they expect that co-negotiators will “anchor” on the range’s lower value or higher value.

Malia F Mason

However, range offers led to stronger outcomes in experiments by Columbia University’s Daniel R. Ames and Malia F. Mason.
This team suggested that these “dual anchors” signal a negotiator’s value awareness and politeness.

Range offers and point offers have varying impacts, depending on the proposer’s perceived preparation, believability, respectfulness, and reasonableness.

Negotiators’ credibility, interpersonal style, and understanding of value were associated with the anchor value’s influence on agreements.

Ames and Mason tested three types of negotiation proposal ranges:

Bolstering Range in which the target point value as the bottom of the range and an aspirational value as the top of the range.
This strategy usually yields generous counteroffers and higher settlement prices. They recommend using Bolstering Range Offers in negotiations.
Backdown Range features the target point value as the upper end of the range and a concession value as the lower offer.
This approach often leads to accepting the lower value and they do not recommend this approach.
Bracketing Range includes the target point offer and often has neutral settlement outcomes for the offer-maker.
This tactic can be perceived by co-negotiators as more collaborative and less aggressive.

Martin Schweinsberg

Extreme anchors are often seen as aggressive and unrealistic, may lead to negotiation breakdown, according to INSEAD’s Martin Schweinsberg with Gillian Ku of London Business School, collaborating with Cynthia S. Wang of University of Michigan, and National University of Singapore’s Madan M. Pillutla.
Even experienced, skillful negotiators said they were offended by extreme offers.
Likewise, less capable negotiators were more likely to walk away from these negotiations.

Gilliam Ku

Point offers and range offers operated independently and interacted to influence settlement values.
They concluded that Bolstering Range Offers imply the co-negotiator’s reservation price and can positively influence negotiation outcomes, whereas Precise Offers influence the perception of offer credibility

When do you present a precise negotiation offer instead of a negotiation range?

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Group “Intelligence”=Social Skills+Number of Women Members

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Anita Wooley Williams

A group’s “general collective intelligence factor” is related to social and communication skills, NOT to the average individual intelligence or even maximum individual intelligence of group members, found Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, with MIT colleagues Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Group intelligence was most closely associated with:

Group member social sensitivity and empathy,
Equal conversational turn-taking,
Proportion of females in the group.

Christopher Chabris

Nearly 700 volunteers completed an individual I.Q. test, then worked in teams on tasks including:

Logical analysis,
Coordination,
Planning,
Brainstorming,
Moral-ethical reasoning.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Each participant also completed a measure of empathy and social reasoning based on identifying emotional states portrayed in images of people’s eyes.

This instrument, Reading the Mind in the Eyes, was developed by University of Cambridge’s Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelright, Jacqueline Hill, Yogini Raste, and Ian Plumb.

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Sally Wheelright

Individuals’ ability to infer other team members’ emotional states correlated with team effectiveness in solving workplace tasks, but not with extraversion or reported motivation.

Teams that performed best in online and face-to-face situations, also demonstrated stronger social and communication skills:

Accurate emotion-reading, empathy, and interpersonal sensitivity,
Communication volume,
Equal participation.

David Engel

High-performing teams accurately inferred others’ feelings even when emotional state was conveyed without visual, auditory, or non-verbal cues, reported Wooley’s team collaborating with MIT’s David Engel and Lisa X. Jing.

CONCLUSION: Teams increase task performance when members have well-developed “Emotional Intelligence,” social insight, and communication skills and when there is a high proportion of women in the team.
These factors are more important than when members have the highest average IQ.

How do you enhance a work group’s collective intelligence in performance tasks?

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©Kathryn Welds

Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

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Most negotiators prefer to have a “fall back position.”
However INSEAD’s Michael Schaerer and Roderick Swaab with Adam Galinsky of Columbia found that having no alternatives and less power than co-negotiators can improve outcomes.

A weak alternative can establish an unfavourably modest “anchor point ,” according to Hebrew University’s late Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton.

These “lowball” first offers usually undermine a negotiator’s final outcome.

Professional athletes and their agents provided examples of negotiating better deals when they had no “back up” offers and “nothing to lose.” They set more ambitious anchor points, and often negotiate a more favourable settlement.

Schaerer and team asked a hundred people whether they would prefer to negotiate a job offer with a weak alternate offer or without any alternative.
More than 90 percent of participants preferred an unattractive alternative offer, confirming that any alternative is usually seen as better than no alternative.

Schaerer asked volunteers to sell previously-owned music when they had:

No offers (no alternative),
One offer at USD $2 (weak alternative),
A bid at USD $8 (strong alternative).

Volunteers in each group proposed a first offer, and rated the degree of power they felt.
People with the “strong” alternative felt most powerful and those with no alternative felt least powerful.

Volunteers with a weak alternative felt more powerful than those with no alternative, but they made lower first offers.
This indicated that they had less confidence than participants with no alternative.

Conclusion: Having any alternative can help people feel powerful but can undermine negotiation performance.

Schaerer’s team asked a volunteer to “sell” a coffee mug to a potential “buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers.

The volunteer “seller” received a phone call from “another buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers, before the volunteer seller met the original potential buyer.
When half the “sellers” met the original purchase prospect, the “buyer” made a low offer.
The “buyer” declined to bid for the other half of “sellers.”

Sellers without an alternative offer said they felt less powerful, but made higher first offers and received significantly higher sales prices than negotiators with an unattractive alternative.

In another situation, half of the “sellers” concentrated on available alternatives (none, weak, or strong) and the remaining negotiators focused on the target price.

Volunteers with unappealing alternatives negotiated worse deals than those with no options when they focused on alternatives.
“Sellers” avoided this pitfall by concentrating on the target price.
Conclusion: Focus on the goal when alternatives are weak.

Negotiators with non-existent or unappealing alternatives can set audacious goals and make an ambitious opening offer because they have “nothing to lose.”
This strategy usually renders better results for the disadvantaged negotiator.

How do you overcome lowball anchoring when you have few negotiation alternatives?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women, Minorities Increase Performance by Resisting Stereotype Threat

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Claude Steele

Stereotype threat occurs when stigmatised group members receive information about the group’s expected behavior, potential, and outcomes.
Typically, stereotype threat reduces performance among stigmatised group members.

Joshua Aronson

Stanford’s Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson of NYU, substituted a positive shared identity for typical stereotypes of women and African American participants in academic tasks.
This intervention was associated with improvee performance compared with the control group of volunteers.

Anthony Greenwald

Stereotypes can be invoked by “implicit primes” even when people explicitly disavowed stereotypes, found University of Washington’s Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, then at Yale.
However, when volunteers focused on tasks rather than beliefs, participants were less likely to render discriminatory decisions.

Laura Kray

Women and men resisted stereotypic negotiation behaviour when they activated a shared identity.
Participants maintained these less-biased behaviours despite receiving explicit stereotype primes, reported University of California, Berkeley’s Laura Kray, Leigh Thompson of Northwestern, and Columbia’s Adam Galinsky.
This finding suggests that vulnerability to stereotype threat can be modified and sustained.

Gordon Moskowitz

People can distance themselves from stereotypes with contrast primes that provide alternatives to a stereotype, noted Lehigh University’s Gordon B. Moskowitz and Ian W. Skurnik of University of Utah.

Ryan P. Brown

Even members of dominant groups can be affected by stereotype threat: Men from majority groups can perform less effectively after receiving a positive stereotype prime.
University of Oklahoma’s Ryan P. Brown and Robert A. Josephs of University of Texas suggested that this performance suppression among members of dominant groups can occur when participants sense a “pressure to live up to the standard”.

Robert A Josephs

People can manage stereotype threat by mentioning the stereotype to activate stereotype resistance.
Another mitigation strategy is to focus on a shared identity that transcends the stigmatized group identity, and provide examples that contradict the stereotype.

How do you manage stereotype threat for yourself and others?
How effective have you found activating stereotype reactance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Precise Negotiation Offers Yield Better Bargaining Results

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Malia F Mason

Opening negotiation offers usually anchor the discussion and shape settlement values.
Many people make opening offers in “round” numbers like USD$10 instead of “precise” numbers like USD$9.
This strategy rendered less effective results in negotiation experiments, reported Columbia’s Malia Mason, Alice J. Lee, Elizabeth A. Wiley, and Daniel Ames.

Y Charles Zhang

Negotiators can improve negotiation outcomes by specifying offers in precise values because they more potently anchor the negotiation range.
In addition, negotiators who proposed precise offers were perceived as more confident, credible, and “well-informed” regarding actual value.

Norbert Schwartz

In a study of consumer confidence in various offer types, University of Michigan’s Y. Charles Zhang and Norbert Schwarz of University of Southern California reported that some recipients of precise offers viewed these proposals as “inflexible.“

However, recipients of precise offers made more conciliatory counter-offers with smaller adjustments and more favorable final settlements.
Precise offers were associated with more favourable final deals even when the negotiator opened with a less ambitious precise offer.

Martin Schweinsberg

Precise offers are less likely to be seen as “aggressive” by a co-negotiator, according to INSEAD’s Martin Schweinsberg collaborating with Gillian Ku and Madan M. Pillutla of London Business School’s and Cynthia S. Wang of Oklahoma State University.
This enables negotiators to present ambitious first offers while avoiding “offending” a negotiation partner and stalling progress toward settlement.

Gillian Ku

This risk of stalemated negotiation increases if negotiators see themselves in a lower-power position and receive an extreme offer.
These negotiators may be more willing to end negotiations,

Manoj Thomas

Precise offers can obscure their actual value, noted Cornell’s Manoj Thomas and Vrinda Kadiyali with Daniel H. Simon of Indiana University.
Buyers underestimated the size of precise prices, particularly under uncertain conditions: U.S. homebuyers paid more when list prices were precise.

Vrinda Kadiyali

Precise offers provide some of the benefits of favorably anchoring negotiation discussions while reducing risks of “offensive” extreme offers.

-*How effective have you found “precise” opening offers in achieving your negotiation goals?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Undermine Salary Negotiations with Excessive Gratitude

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Andreas Leibbrandt

Candid self-disclosure hurt women’s salary negotiation outcomes when they revealed that a salary exceeded their expectations, in a study by Monash University’s Andreas Leibbrandt and John A. List of the University of Chicago.

John List

Some women applying for administrative assistant jobs were told that the wages were “negotiable,” and these women achieved higher pay offers than women who received no information. Volunteers in the no-information group frequently revealed that they were willing to work for a lower hourly rate, and they received lower average salary offers.

Edward E. Jones

Though this approach likely leads to lower salary, it could be considered strategic ingratiation to enhance the future working relationship>
However, this approach could lead the negotiation partner to question the applicant’s judgment and confidence.
In addition, this maneuver may delay salary increases because the candidate expresses satisfaction with the original offer.

Strategic ingratiation is observed in several behaviours, according to Duke University’s Edward E. Jones:

-Self-presentation: Self-enhancement or “one-down” humility, providing favors or gifts,

-Flattery: “Other-enhancement” by sharing credible positive comments,

-Agreement: Opinion-conformity and matching non-verbal behaviour.

Steven H. Appelbaum

Positive outcomes from “strategic ingratiation” included promotion or pay increase, observed in a study by Concordia University’s Steven H. Appelbaum and Brent Hughes.

This contradictory finding was explained by situational and individual factors including:

Machiavellianism,
Locus of control,
Work task uniqueness.

Jeffrey Flory

In another of Leibbrandt and List’s randomized field studies, collaborating with Concordia colleague Jeffrey Flory, men did not wait for permission to negotiate when no statement was made about salary discussions.

In fact, male participants said they prefer ambiguous salary negotiation norms or“competitive work settings” in which salary negotiation was typically expected.

Women frequently do not negotiate unless given explicit permission.
but when they are invited to negotiate, they obtained higher salaries as frequently as men

Leibbrandt, List, and Flory concluded that women accept “competitive” workplaces when “the job task is female-oriented” and the local labor market offers few alternatives.

Women who seek higher salaries benefit from proposing their “aspirational salaries” rather than waiting for permission to negotiate.
Women negotiators can achieve better outcomes when they offer moderate expressions of gratitude and avoid revealing their “reserve” salary figure.

-*In what work situations have you benefited from applying ‘strategic ingratiation’?

-*To what extent have you seen expressions of gratitude in negotiation undermine bargaining outcomes?

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©Kathryn Welds

Loneliness as Health Risk; Reframing Can Help

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Julianne Holt-Lundstad

Loneliness increases mortality risk by 26 percent, comparable to health risks of obesity, cigarette smoking, and excessive alcohol use, according to Brigham Young University’s Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker, Tyler Harris, and David Stephenson.
Loneliness harms people’s health in addition to triggering emotional discomfort.

Timothy Smith

Loneliness and social isolation differ.
Some people report feeling lonely in the presence of others, whereas socially isolated people may not report loneliness.
However, both loneliness and social isolation increased risk for mortality in a meta-analysis of more than 3 million participants in studies of loneliness, social isolation, and living alone.

Megan Knowles

Lonely individuals benefited more from learning to cope with social performance anxiety than from developing social skills, found Franklin & Marshall College’s Megan L. Knowles, Gale M. Lucas of University of Southern California, Florida State University’s Roy Baumeister, and Wendi L. Gardner of Northwestern.

Gale M. Lucas

More than 85 volunteers completed a loneliness self-report, then identified emotions expressed on computer-presented faces.
Self-described lonely people out-performed non-lonely people when social sensitivity tasks were described as measures of “academic aptitude.”

Roy Baumeister

However, lonely participants performed worse when tasks were presented as tests of “social aptitude.”
These volunteers also reported difficulty forming and maintaining friendships, suggesting that social anxiety leads to “choking” in social “performance” situations.
The result is continued loneliness.

Wendi Gardner

Lonely people may be more socially competent than the non-lonely: They were more skilled at remembering social information in studies by Northwestern’s Wendi L. Gardner, Cynthia L. Pickett of University of California Davis, and Ohio State University’s Marilynn B. Brewer.
The team assessed social recall by presenting volunteers with a simulated computer chat task that provided brief acceptance or rejection experiences, then a diary containing both social and individual events.

Cynthia L. Pickett

When social anxiety could be reattributed to an external cause , task performance increased.
Volunteers consumed a non-caffeinated energy beverage and were told that any jitters they might experience could be attributed to the “caffeine” they’d just consumed.
This explanation provided a plausible but false rationale for anxious feelings.

Alison Wood Brooks

Similarly, Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks found that reframing nervousness as “excitement” helped people perform better on stressful tasks.

An additional coping approach for lonely people is modifying personal mindsets following social loss cues.

Carol Dweck

Fixed mindset, identified by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, is a belief that personal capabilities are limited to present capacities.
This perspective is similar to security-oriented, prevention-focused behaviors of lonely people observed by University of Southern California’s Lucas with Knowles, Gardner, Daniel C. Molden and Valerie E. Jefferis of Northwestern.
This mindset can lead to fear, anxiety, protectiveness and guardedness.

Daniel Molden

In contrast, growth mindset is similar to promotion-focused responses like attempts at social engagement.
This developmental mindset holds that personal capabilities can expand based on commitment, effort, practice, instruction, and correcting mistakes.
This view enables teamwork, collaboration, and social interaction.

Marilynn Brewer

To demonstrate these effects, Lucas’s group gave volunteers cues of acceptance or rejection.
People who received positive primes were more likely to develop a promotion-focused growth mindset.
These participants also reported more effective social thoughts, intentions, and behaviors.

People who experience social anxiety and loneliness can reduce social avoidance by reframing discomfort as “excitement” and by embracing learning and new experiences in a growth mindset.

-*How do you manage loneliness?

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©Kathryn Welds

Workplace Incivility is Contagious, Damaging

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James Bartlett

Workplace incivility has measurable negative consequences including reduced employee engagement and productivity, according to North Carolina State University’s James E. Bartlett and Michelle E. Bartlett with Florida Atlantic University’s Thomas G. Reio.

Trevor Foulk

Rudeness in the workplace is contagious and leads people to be vigilant for subsequent slights, reported University of Florida’s Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum, and Amir Erez.
They suggested that low-level workplace hostility enables similar behavior throughout the organization, leading to eroded culture and productivity.

Andrew Woolum

Ninety volunteers practiced negotiation with partners, and those who rated their initial negotiation partner as rude were more likely to be rated as rude by a subsequent partner.

Participants seemed to assimilate and convey the first partner’s rudeness.
The effect persisted during the week between the first and second negotiations.

Amir Erez

Foulk’s team staged interactions between an apologetic late-arriving participant and the study leader, who responded neutrally or rudely.
Then, volunteers completed a timed task to distinguish real words from nonsense words.

Participants who observed the leader’s rude response more quickly identified rude words in a task than participants who had observed the neutral interaction.
Observing rude interactions can “prime” people’s awareness and sensitivity to future uncivil interactions.

Walter Mischel

People who witnessed rudeness were more likely to be rude to others, confirming the impact of observing aggression on future behavior, earlier demonstrated in often-cited “Bobo” experiments by Stanford’s Walter Mischel, Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross.

Mischel’s experiment with Bobo doll

Foulk’s group also observed this priming effect when volunteers watched a video of a rude workplace interaction, then answered a fictitious customer neutral-toned email.
Participants’ responses were more likely to be hostile than those who viewed a polite interaction before responding.

“Rudeness will flavor the way you interpret ambiguous cues,” noted Foulk, who contended that harsh interactions can reduce collaboration and trust in the workplace.

-*How do you stop the spread of workplace incivility?

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When Do Women Talk More than Men?

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Women talk more than men.
Women talk less than men.

-*Which is true?

It depends.

Kay Deaux

Social context and expectations determine when females talk more than males, according to NYU’s Kay Deaux and Brenda Major of University of California Santa Barbara.

Brenda Major

One investigation used electronic audio monitoring devices (digital “sociometers”) to identify gender associated with talk volume during a work collaboration project, and during lunchtime social conversations at work. This study was conducted by Harvard’s Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Sebastian Schnorf, with David Lazer of Northeastern and MIT colleagues Benjamin N. Waber and Sandy Pentland.

Jukka-Pekka Onnela

During the work project women talked significantly more than men, except when groups included seven or more people.
In contrast, women spoke less than men in larger groups during the work project.
In addition, women sat closer to other women in larger project groups.

Sebastian Schnorf

During social conversations, women talked the same amount as men, and more than men when the group was large.
Group size is associated with women’s verbal participation in groups depending on the task focus vs. social focus.

Matthias Mehl

These findings support earlier reports of equal verbal participation by women and men by University of Arizona’s Matthias R. Mehl, collaborating with Simine Vazire of Washington University in St. Louis. Their collaborators included University of Connecticut’s Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, with Richard B. Slatcher of Wayne State and University of Texas’s James W. Pennebaker.
This team analyzed voice recordings from more than 390 participants, and concluded that women and men both spoke about 16,000 words per day.

David Lazer

Women in large group social settings spoke more than women in collaborative work projects, found Onnela’s team.
The strongest difference in gender participation related to relationship strength and group size.

Scott E. Page

These results have implications for work groups that develop problem solutions and innovations.
Contributions from all women and men in diverse work groups are required to produce the largest number and most innovative solutions, according to Loyola University’s Lu Hong and Scott E. Page.
They found that diverse work groups produce superior solutions compared with homogenous groups, even if groups were composed of uniformly top performers.

In fact, a group’s “general collective intelligence factor” is most closely associated with:

Proportion of females in the group,
Average social sensitivity of group members,
Equal conversational turn-taking.

Anita Wooley Williams

This “collective intelligence factor” was not related to the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members, found Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris of Union College, with MIT colleagues Sandy Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Women can apply these insights by increasing verbal participation at work to establish visibility and credibility, while contributing to group performance.

-*How do you determine your degree of verbal contribution in work groups?

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Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

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Sreedhari Desai

Anxious people were more likely to act with self-interested unethical behavior in studies by University of North Carolina’s Sreedhari Desai and Maryam Kouchaki of Northwestern.

Maryam Kou

Anxiety was also associated with increased threat perception and decreased concern about personal unethical actions in simulated subordinate–supervisor pairs.

Desai noted that “individuals who feel anxious and threatened can take on self-defensive behaviors and focus narrowly on their own basic needs and self-interest.
This can cause them to be less mindful of principles that guide ethical and moral reasoning – and make them rationalize their own actions as acceptable.”

Charles Carver

Engaging in unethical behaviors may offer more options and greater control over outcomes, found University of Miami’s Charles Carver and Michael Scheier of Carnegie Mellon.
Unethical behavior was also associated with feelings of greater autonomy and influence, particularly in ambiguous situations, according to Ohio State’s Roy Lewicki.

Michael Scheier

People who violate ethical norms can experience a ‘cheater’s high‘ instead of guilt, found University of Washington’s Nicole E. Ruedy and Celia Moore of London Business School.

Roy Lewicki

Cheaters in Ruedy’s research reported emotional uplift and self-satisfaction instead of guilt, and Paul Ekman of University of California, San Francisco referred to this exuberance among some cheaters as “duping delight.”

Nicole Ruedy

In Ruedy’s studies, nearly 180 people completed a four-minute anagram task to earn $1 for every correctly unscrambled word.
Participants then rated current feelings from positive to negative, both before and after the task.

Celia Moore

Volunteers’ actual answers on the task were compared from imprints between their answer sheets to determine which participants reported inaccurate results.

More than 40% of these volunteers wrote in additional answers to increase their earnings, and reported significantly positive feelings after cheating on the task.

Even when Ruedy’s team told volunteers that researchers knew participants may be providing inaccurate reports in an insoluble anagram task, more than half the participants reported implausibly high scores.

Cheaters had higher levels of positive affect even when confronted with the team’s awareness of their potential deceit.
They also showed higher levels of self-satisfaction and feeling clever, capable, accomplished, satisfied, and superior.

Earning more money didn’t add to the “cheater’s high,” suggesting a top threshold for positive feelings associated with cheating.

Maurice Schweitzer

These findings suggest that organizational leaders can increase employee quality-of-life and diminish unethical workplace behaviors by clarifying roles, which reduces anxiety.

Leaders also can reduce employees’ anxiety by:

Paul Ekman:

Setting realistic expectations for employee workload,
Adopting Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) and flex time,
Emphasizing the value of experimentation, flexibility, and innovation.

-*How have you seen high-anxiety workplaces affect employees’ ethical judgment?

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Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizsational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Coach

Category Archives: Business Communication

Range Offers vs Point Offers for Better Negotiation Settlements

Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

Women, Minorities Increase Performance by Resisting Stereotype Threat

Precise Negotiation Offers Yield Better Bargaining Results

Women Undermine Salary Negotiations with Excessive Gratitude

Workplace Incivility is Contagious, Damaging

When Do Women Talk More than Men?

Anxiety Linked to Risk of Behaving Unethically

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