Tag Archives: negotiation

Anxiety Undermines Negotiation Performance

Maurice Schweitzer

Anxious negotiators make lower first offers, end negotiations earlier, and earn lower profits than calmer negotiation counterparts.

Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer of University of Pennsylvania found that these negotiations patterns occurred due to participants’ “low self-efficacy” beliefs.

Alison Wood Brooks

Brooks and Schweitzer induced anxious feelings or neutral reactions during “shrinking-pie” negotiation tasks.
Negotiators who reported feeling anxious expected to achieve lower profits, presented more cautious offers, and responded cautiously to proposals by negotiation counterparts.

Negotiators who achieved better outcomes managed their emotions with strategies including:

Julie Norem

Strategic optimism, by calmly expecting positive outcomes, according to University of Miami’s Stacie Spencer and Julie Norem of Wellesley,

Reattribution, by considering alternate interpretations of events.

Approaches with mixed results include:

Andrew Elliot

“Self-handicapping”, defined as creating obstacles to explain poor outcomes and preserve self-esteem, according to University of Rochester’s Andrew Elliott and Marcy Church of St. Mary’s University,
Defensive pessimism, marked by high motivation toward achievement coupled with negative expectations for future challenges, leading to increased effort and preparation, according to Wellesley College’s Julie Norem and Edward Chang of University of Michigan.

Edward Chang

Norem and Cantor concluded that defensive pessimists performed worse when told that that they could expect to perform well on anagram and puzzle tasks.

Defensive pessimism among university students was related to lower self-esteem, higher self-criticism, more pessimism, and frequent discounting of previous successful performances, according to Norem and Brown’s Jasmina Burdzovic Andreas.

Jasmina Burdzovic Andreas

However, they also found that self-esteem increased to almost the same levels as optimists during university years.
Pessimists’ precautionary countermeasures may have resulted in strong performance, which built credible self-esteem.

Defensive pessimism may be an effective approach to managing anxiety and performance motivation.

-*How do you manage anxiety in high-stakes negotiations?

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©Kathryn Welds

Ask for What You Want: You Have More Influence Than You Think

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Most people underestimate the likelihood that requests for help will be granted, particularly after previous refusals, according to Stanford’s Daniel Newark and Francis Flynn with Vanessa Lake Bohns of University of Waterloo.

Francis Flynn

Help-seekers underestimated the agreement rate of potential helpers who previously refused assistance.
This suggests that most people agree with a subsequent request, to reduce discomfort of rejecting others’ overtures for help.

Vanessa Bohns

Participants estimated they would need to ask 10 people to have three agree to lend their mobile phones for brief calls.
In fact, these volunteers had to ask an average of six people for help before it was given, 40% fewer than expected.
Most people have a pessimistic bias about the likelihood that others will provide assistance, they concluded.

Volunteers requested two favors of strangers: Complete a brief survey and take a letter to a nearby post office.
Help seekers predicted that people who refused the first request to complete the survey would be less likely to take the letter to the post office.

More people agreed to the second request than to the first request.
Requesters tended to “anchor” on the first refusal, and hesitated to make a second request.
This finding suggests that requesters have a greater chance of agreement after initial refusal, so it’s advisable to persist.

Requesters and help-seekers analyzed requests using different implicit criteria: Requesters focused on the magnitude of the “ask,” whereas potential helpers considered the inconvenience costs of saying “yes” compared with the interpersonal and self-image costs of saying “no.”

Requesters benefit from expanding the pool of those they ask, not just those who reliably and consistently agree.
Potential helpers to can assist by reducing help-seekers’ subjective discomfort even if they decline the request.

Mahdi Roghanizad

Bohns analysed interpersonal discomfort when people decide whether to commit an unethical act in research with University of Waterloo colleagues Mahdi Roghanizad and Amy Xu.

People who observed the unethical act but didn’t participate underestimated their influence over those who committed the actions.
Interpersonal discomfort caused participants to commit the asocial act to avoid conflict, they concluded.

Volunteers enlisted people they didn’t know to tell a small untruth or to commit a small act of vandalism after predicting the ease of enlisting others in these acts.
In related investigations, online participants responded to hypothetical vignettes about buying alcohol for children, and taking office supplies home for personal use.

These results suggest that most people underestimate their influence, particularly in situations that can evoke interpersonal discomfort.
Bohns and Flynn also reported that employees’ systematically underestimate their influence over others in the workplace.

This pessimistic bias can limit employees’ willingness to:

Lead business transformation initiatives,
Recognize personal contributions to others’ performance issues,
Voice concerns about unethical workplace practices.

This underestimation bias may be reduced by:

Eliciting comparative judgments,
Objectifying an influence target,
Comparing actual degree of personal influence compared to perceived influence,
Considering means of influence, including incentives, suggestions, reinforcements, punishments,
Invoking organizational culture.

These findings suggest the benefit of asking for what you want, even after rejection and that you have more influence over others than you expect.

-*How do you assess your likelihood of getting what you want when you ask?

-*How likely are others to influence you by evoking social discomfort to increase your compliance?

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©Kathryn Welds

Apologies: Repairing Relationships, Creating Interpersonal Peace

“Feminine Charm” as Negotiation Tactic

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Charlotte Brontë

Jane Austen

“Feminine charm” was one of the few available negotiation tactics for women in past decades, portrayed in novels by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.

Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that she used “charm” in negotiations with heads of state. This statement inspired University of California, Berkeley’s Laura Kray and Alex Van Zant with Connson Locke of London School of Economics to investigate “feminine charm” in negotiation situations.

Madeleine Albright

Laura Kray

They found that “the aim of feminine charm is to make an interaction partner feel good as a way of gaining compliance.

They found that “charm” is characterized by:

Friendliness, or concern for the other person,
Flirtation, or concern for self and self-presentation.

Hannah Riley Bowles

They learned that “feminine charm” (friendliness plus flirtation) partially buffered the social penalties (“backlash”) against women’s efforts to negotiate, identified by Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and her colleagues.

Linda Babcock

Women who were perceived as flirtatious achieved superior economic deals in negotiations compared with women who were seen as friendly.

This finding validates Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock’s discovery that women achieve better negotiation outcomes when they combine power tactics with warmth.

Their findings expose “a financial risk associated with female friendliness:…the resulting division of resources may be unfavorable if she is perceived as ‘too nice’.”

-*How do you mitigate the “financial risk associated with female friendliness”?

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©Kathryn Welds

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

1 Reply

Taya Cohen

Agreement bias is the tendency to agree (“settle”) in a negotiation even if the outcome is disadvantageous.

During negotiation, participants’ positions and interests may be significantly different.
Skillful negotiators usually end the discussion if it is unlikely to move beyond a stalemate.

Leigh Thompson

Negotiators may accept a disadvantageous deal for reasons besides personality traits, explained Carnegie Mellon’s Taya Cohen and Leigh Thompson of Northwestern with University of Toronto’s Geoffrey J. Leonardelli.

◦ Sunk Costs: Participants may wish to achieve any resolution, to derive some sense of value for the invested time and effort,

◦ Image: Negotiators may wish to appear likeable,

◦ Erroneous Anchoring: People may assume that their interests and the negotiation partner’s are mutually exclusive.

◦ Strength in Numbers: Negotiators who are outnumbered by the other negotiation team tend to agree to suboptimal deals.

As a result, negotiators may overlook “integrative” (“and/both”) solutions,

Geoffrey J Leonardelli

People negotiating teams tend to be less susceptible to agreement bias when positions and interests significantly differ, found Cohen, Thompson, and Leonardelli.

Solo negotiators demonstrated more agreeable behavior, and were more likely to agree to unfavourable conditions.
When solo negotiators were joined by only one person, they avoided unfavorable agreements thanks to additional decision support.

Douglas Jackson

Agreement bias even occurs in anonymous surveys, reported Douglas Jackson, then of Educational Testing Services and Penn State.
This acquiescence bias, is triggered when people agree to survey items no matter the content.

Samuel Messick

Social desirability concern can accelerate agreements in negotiations, surveys, and life, found Jackson and his ETS colleague Samuel Messick in a factor analysis of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) items.

Robin Pinkley

Inaccurate judgments can lead also to unfavorable agreements, noted SMU’s Robin L. Pinkley, Terri L. Griffith of Santa Clara University, and University of Illinois’s Gregory B. Northcraft.

Terri Griffith

Pinkley’s group demonstrated ineffective outcomes when negotiators :

Accurately processed inaccurate or incomplete information
(information availability errors),
Inaccurately processed valid or complete information
(information processing errors).

Gregory Northcraft

-*How do you guard against agreeing to bad deals?

-*How do you reduce Information availability errors and information processing errors?

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©Kathryn Welds

Women Balance on the Negotiation Tightrope to Avoid Backlash

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Linda Babcock

Women less frequently negotiate initial salaries than men, leading to a long-term wage disparity, reported Carnegie-Mellon University’s Linda Babcock.

Hannah Riley Bowles

Women who did negotiate were negatively evaluated by both men and women participants in a lab study, found Harvard’s Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai.
These volunteers reported less desire to work with women who asked for more money.

Lei Lai

Both male and female evaluators said they disliked “demandingness” among women who negotiated, and said they preferred “nicer” non-negotiators.
However, reducing women’s degree of assertiveness did not improve evaluators’s perceptions of women negotiators.

These findings support Babcock’s results: When male and female volunteers asked for salary increases using identical scripts in controlled lab situations, participants liked men’s style, but disliked the same words from women.
Women negotiators were considered “aggressive” unless they smiled, or displayed a warm, friendly manner.

The social reaction to women negotiators was improved when female participants:

Justified the salary request based on a supporting “business case,”
Communicated concern for organizational relationships.

Applying these tactics did not improve women’s negotiation outcomes, but improved other people’s reactions to women negotiators.

In contrast, women negotiators improved both social and negotiation outcomes when they justified the salary request based on the relationship.

Women who smile and focus on the interpersonal relationship fulfill gender role expectations, leading to greater approval by male and female observers.

Kathleen McGinn

Bowles, with Harvard colleague Kathleen McGinn and Babcock, suggested that “situational ambiguity” and “gender triggers” modify women’s willingness to negotiate.

When women have information about the potential salary range and whether the salary is negotiable, they are more likely to negotiate.
Women can improve their negotiation outcomes by asking:

the salary range,
which elements of the compensation package are negotiable.

Daniel Pink

Effective negotiation is a survival skill, according to Dan Pink:
“The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.
It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives.”

He noted that effective persuaders and “sellers” collaborate in “inspecting” a negotiation and “responding” to the negotiation through “interpersonal attunement.”

Pink suggested ABC negotiation skills:

– Attunement: Aligning actions and attitudes with others,

– Buoyancy: “Positivity,” optimism, asking questions,

– Clarity: Helping others identify unrecognized needs that can be fulfilled by the negotiation proposal.

Joan Williams

UC Hastings College of the Law’s Joan Williams offered strategies to address documented wage discrepancies.

As more women negotiate salaries, managers may view this as an expected practice.

What is the best negotiation pitch you’ve heard for a job-related salary increase or role promotion?
How did the person overcome objections?
How did the person manage the relationship with the negotiating partner?

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©Kathryn Welds

“Everything is Negotiable”: Prepare, Ask, Revise, Ask Again

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Anna Beninger

Alixandra Pollack

Women negotiated salaries less frequently than men, leading to a persistent compensation gaps for women MBA graduates from 26 leading business schools in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, in a study by Catalyst’s Anna Beninger and Alixandra Pollack.

Similarly, women in academic medicine earned about 80 percent of their male peers’ compensation in a salary study by Harvard’s Catherine DesRoches, Sowmya Rao, Lisa Iezzoni, and Eric Campbell with Darren Zinner of Brandeis.

Catherine DesRoches

Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock reported that women MBAs earn USD $500,000 – USD $2 million less over their careers than their male classmates.
She linked this difference to men’s greater willingness to negotiate salary and promotions.

Babcock, with Sara Laschever, outlined precursors of these negotiation differences based on gender socialization.

Linda Babcock

They observed that many parents encourage boys to take risks, earn money, and participate in competitive team sports.
These activities prepare boys to negotiate, compete, and tolerate disrupted interpersonal relationships, according to Babcock and Laschever.

In contrast, they noted that parents may instead encourage girls to play collaboratively and value interpersonal affiliation.

John List

The gender-based wage gap’s association with women not negotiating salaries and preferring less competitive work roles, was also reported by University of Chicago’s John List, Andreas Leibbrandt, and Jeffrey Flory.

Their research studied respondents to two identical “job ads” on internet job boards with different wage structures.
One position offered hourly pay whereas the other role’s pay depended on performance compared with coworkers.
More women than men applied to the hourly wage role.

Andreas Leibbrandt

Men were 94 percent more likely than women to seek and perform well in competitive work roles in data from nearly 7,000 job seekers across 16 large American cities.
This gender wage gap “more than doubled” as performance-linked compensation increased.
Women in these studies were significantly more likely to walk away from a competitive workplace when they had alternate employment options.

Jeffrey Flory

Women were more likely to apply to jobs if the performance relied on teamwork rather than individual accomplishment, or if the salary was a flat fee independent of their performance.

Men were also more likely to negotiate when there was no explicit statement that wages are negotiable.
They did not wait for an invitation or permission to negotiate.
In these studies, women negotiated as frequently as men when they were invited to ask for higher salaries and job titles.

Negotiation practices considered “acceptable” for men are often viewed as “aggressive” when women use them, according to Babcock.
To counteract this reaction, she and Laschever advised women to:

Consider that “everything is negotiable,”
Research personal “market worth” using online resources like Salary.com, Payscale.com, and Glassdoor.com,
Consider oneself a viable candidate for higher salaries and job roles,
Examine self-limiting beliefs about negotiation,
Plan negotiation talking points, including accomplishments, results, impact,
Practice negotiating the salary proposal, suggest timing, set an ambitious anchor point, prepare for objections,
Plan counter-offers and practice self-regulation (such as through intentional breathing) to maintain negotiation position and interpersonal rapport.

Collaborative negotiation enables both people to derive value from the negotiation conversation through preparation, proactivity, and persistence while reaffirming the negotiation goal’s value for all parties.

Negotiation principles were summarised in the classic Getting to Yes: Negotiating without Giving In by Harvard’s Roger Fisher and William Ury.
Research-based guidance on effective Negotiation by Ohio State’s Roy Lewicki, David Saunders of Queen’s University, and Vanderbilt’s Bruce Barry of Vanderbilt.

Leigh Thompson

More than 90% of all negotiators neglect to ask “diagnostic questions” that reveal the negotiation partner’s most important needs, priorities, preferences, and even fears, found Leigh Thompson of Northwestern.
When negotiators elicited these “wants,” they achieved significantly improved negotiation outcomes.

Television journalist Mika Brzezinski echoed Babcock and Laschever’s recommendations based on interviews with prominent women and men discussing the persistent gender wage gap.
She suggested a structure to guide negotiation:

Research,
Leverage,
Negotiate,
Re-negotiate.

Pat Heim

Women’s reluctance to negotiate may be related to gender differences in attributions of success and failure, suggested Pat Heim.
Women often attribute failures to themselves (“internalizing”) whereas men identify external factors (“rationalisations”) associated with their shortcomings.
Women are more likely to attribute success to external factors (“deflection of merit”), whereas men typically attribute their effective performance to to themselves (“self-bolstering”).

Men are often promoted because they are seen to have “potential,” but women are more likely to be promoted based on their results and accomplishments, noted Heim.
Even factors like attire can influence perception of authority: Men judged women as less authoritative when wearing “business casual” attire.

These studies encourage women to develop skills and behaviours required to close the wage gap between professional women and men.

-How do you prepare for negotiations and overcome objections during negotiations?

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Range Offers vs Point Offers for Advantageous Negotiation Settlements

Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

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Michael Schaerer

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

When an alternative is weak, it can undermine negotiating outcomes.
An alternative can establish an “anchor point,” a frequent cognitive bias characterized by overvaluing one piece of information, according to Hebrew University’s late Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman of Princeton.

Adam Galinsky

People with weak alternatives often make lower first offers than negotiators with no alternative.
“Lowball” first offers usually undermine a negotiator’s final outcome.

Professional athletes and their agents provide examples of negotiating better deals when they have no “back up” offers and “nothing to lose.” They can set ambitious anchor points, and may arrive at a more favourable settlement.

Amos Tversky

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

Schaerer asked volunteers to imagine trying to sell previously-owned music in one of three conditions when they had:

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

Roderick Swaab

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

Volunteers with a weak alternative felt more powerful than those with no alternative, but they made lower first offers.
This signaled 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 investigated by pairing a “seller,” who offered to sell a coffee mug to a potential “buyer.”

Before meeting, the seller received a phone call from “another buyer,” who was a confederate of the researchers.
The potential buyer either made a low offer for half of the sellers or declined to bid for the remaining sellers.

Daniel Kahneman

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 the benefit of “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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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 $10 instead of “precise” numbers like $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 anchored the negotiation range.
In addition, negotiators who proposed precise offers were perceived as more confident, credible, and “well-informed” regarding actual value.

Norbert Schwartz

Consumers reported less confidence in precise estimates when they doubt the communicator, found University of Michigan’s Y. Charles Zhang and Norbert Schwarz of University of Southern California.

Some recipients of precise offers view these proposals by their negotiation partners 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 favorable 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.
Ambitious first offers may stall progress toward settlement if a negotiation partner takes offense.

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, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: negotiation

Anxiety Undermines Negotiation Performance

Ask for What You Want: You Have More Influence Than You Think

Apologies: Repairing Relationships, Creating Interpersonal Peace

“Feminine Charm” as Negotiation Tactic

Do You Accept Bad Deals?

“Everything is Negotiable”: Prepare, Ask, Revise, Ask Again

Range Offers vs Point Offers for Advantageous Negotiation Settlements

Nothing to Lose: Effective Negotiating Even When “Powerless”

Precise Negotiation Offers Yield Better Bargaining Results

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