Job seekers and employees receive no shortage of advice on salary negotiation strategies, such as whether to make the first offer, how high to aim, how to add multiple issues to the discussion, and so on. But if they don’t think a particular salary negotiation strategy will be effective in their specific situation, they won’t try it—and will fall back on another strategy instead.
Acknowledging this fact, in a recent study, researchers Jens Mazei, Jacqueline Amanda Grabowski, and Joachim Hüffmeier from Germany’s Dortmund University explored which salary negotiation strategies women, in particular, are likely to use. While the study results are tailored to women, they offer useful guidance for all job negotiators.
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Addressing the Gender Pay Gap
Women are more likely than men to be penalized for initiating salary negotiations, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Hannah Riley Bowles and her colleagues have found in their research. This is likely because initiating negotiations violates stereotypes of women as accommodating and communal.
This backlash effect undoubtedly contributes to the gender pay gap in the United States—the fact that women earn about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. However, broader factors explain much more of the pay gap, including differences in men’s and women’s career trajectories, women’s underrepresentation in higher-paying roles, and gender bias in hiring and promotion decisions, according to Bowles.
Moreover, recent research indicates that, these days, women are initiating salary negotiations at least as often as men in professional spheres.
Nonetheless, as individuals and organizations work to address structural barriers that contribute to the pay gap, there may be salary negotiation strategies that are particularly useful to women.
For example, women might avoid a backlash by adopting more gender-stereotypical negotiation strategies, such as appealing to communal norms and behaviors. When asking for a raise, a woman might say, for instance, “I know our company values negotiating skills, so I thought it would be appropriate for me to open up this conversation.”
Two Common Salary Negotiation Strategies Emerge
Yet past research by Mazei and others found that women largely rejected such specific salary negotiation strategies, choosing instead to simply negotiating assertively or giving in. This is because women anticipated that such strategies would perpetuate gender stereotypes, seem weak, and thus not be effective at winning them more money.
In interviews, women who were experienced negotiators shared two salary negotiation strategies that they were much more likely to use: (1) asking for a performance appraisal before asking for a raise, and (2) detailing how they plan to contribute to the organization in the future.
Women said that they asked for a performance appraisal before a raise to highlight their accomplishments and motivate their boss to reward them. In the process, they thought they might avoid a backlash for behaving assertively—while avoiding the trap of seeming stereotypically communal.
The other strategy—delineating the contributions one plans to make to one’s organization—aims to trigger the well-documented norm of reciprocity, or the pervasive human tendency to try to repay others for what they’ve given us. If you highlight the great things you’ll do for the company, your boss will be obliged to reward you with a raise, this thinking goes.
Which Salary Negotiation Strategy Is Most Preferred?
In a recent laboratory experiment, Mazei, Grabowski, and Hüffmeier looked at whether women do generally rely on these two largely unstudied salary negotiation strategies, regardless of their negotiating experience. The researchers gave over 100 participants a list of seven salary negotiation strategies—including the two strategies just described, communal strategies, and simply behaving assertively or yielding. Participants, who were told they had strong performance records, were then asked to choose one, and only one, of these strategies to use in a subsequent simulated salary negotiation role-play with another participant (who was sometimes male and sometimes female).
The participants vastly preferred one of the strategies: asking for a performance review before asking for a raise. More than half chose this strategy; by comparison, 17% chose to delineate their plans for the organization, and 17% chose “assertiveness,” followed by yielding, appealing to communal norms, and other strategies in much smaller numbers. And, in fact, about half the participants did indeed ask for a performance appraisal during the negotiation role-play that followed.
Future research is needed to test whether asking for a performance review generates higher raises than other salary negotiation strategies. (Given the experiment’s format, the researchers were not able to study this.) The strategy seems likely to work best when you have strong work accomplishments to highlight.
The research findings highlight the importance of considering not only the likely effectiveness of various salary negotiation strategies but also people’s willingness to use them. It also shows that, oftentimes, people are perfectly capable of coming up with effective salary negotiation strategies on their own.
What are your preferred salary negotiation strategies?
Claim your FREE copy: Salary Negotiations
Discover how to refine your negotiation skills with this free special report, Salary Negotiations: How to Negotiate Salary: Learn the Best Techniques to Help You Manage the Most Difficult Salary Negotiations and What You Need to Know When Asking for a Raise, from Harvard Law School.
