“We’re very much a sexist society,” actress Jennifer Aniston said in back in 2015 in an interview with the New York Times, addressing not just the constant questions she faces about marriage and children, but about recent revelations of pay discrimination and salary negotiation in Hollywood.
“Women are still not paid as much as men,” Aniston … Read More 
Learn how to negotiate like a diplomat, think on your feet like an improv performer, and master job offer negotiation like a professional athlete when you download a copy of our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
salary negotiations
What are Salary Negotiations?
What’s the best way to claim more money in salary negotiations? Truly great negotiators recognize that haggling strategies alone may leave significant money on the table.
Most negotiators don’t engage in the kinds of high-stakes bargaining we read about in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but almost everyone will find themselves engaged in salary negotiations during the course of their career.
Especially for a new employee, salary negotiations can be intimidating, and it’s one of the most important difficult conversations to have at the beginning of your career. But even for experienced employees, salary negotiations are never predictable.
Savvy job seekers remember to treat these negotiations as the beginning of a long-term relationship. You can get that relationship off on the right foot by looking for opportunities to give the employer what it wants even as you seek to get what you want.
Unfortunately, the first number mentioned in salary negotiations, such as how much one earned in one’s most recent job, exerts a strong influence on the discussions that follow. Yet, when we start looking at “salary negotiations” as “job negotiations,” we realize this doesn’t have to be the case.
The more information you can provide about what you value (without revealing your bottom line), the better equipped you and the other party will be to identify new issues to discuss. And the more questions you ask, the more you will learn about what the other party values. This type of information exchange will put you in a good position to claim as much money and other value as possible for yourself.
To learn more about finding success in salary negotiations, download a complimentary copy of our 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, right now!
The following items are tagged salary negotiations:
NEW FREE REPORT! Salary Negotiations
Discover how to refine your negotiation skills with this free special report, Negotiation Training: How Harvard Negotiation Exercises, Negotiation Cases and Good Negotiation Coaching Can Make You a Better Negotiator, from Harvard Law School.
… Read More
The Importance of Negotiation for Female Negotiators: Women Should “Negotiate Hard”
When U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama was offered her first job after law school, it didn’t even occur to her to negotiate for a higher salary, she said in a recent interview in Parade magazine.
… Read More
BATNA Basics: Boost Your Power at the Bargaining Table
Perfect your negotiation skills in this free special report, BATNA Basics: Boost Your Power at the Bargaining Table from Harvard Law School.
… Read More
Salary Negotiations and How to Negotiate Performance-Based Pay
Salary negotiations are never predictable. Imagine that you are a sales rep with a company that is getting hit hard by a financial crisis. No one has been laid off yet, but everyone is nervous about that possibility. In an effort to save jobs, your sales manager has quietly proposed that everyone take lower base … Read More
Negotiation in Business: Ignore Sunk Costs
Think about what your house, condominium, or some other valuable asset might be worth in today’s market. Did the price you paid for it affect your answer?
… Read More
How to Negotiate Salary: 3 Winning Strategies
The question of how to negotiate salary seems to preoccupy negotiators more than any other—and with good reason, considering how dramatically even a small salary increase can impact our lifetime earnings. The following three salary bargaining tips from leading negotiation experts will help you gain more from your new-job negotiations.
… Read More
Salary Negotiation: How to Ask for a Higher Salary
For a new employee, salary negotiation skills can be the most important and the most intimidating, but the most important, of difficult conversations to have at the beginning of your career. A new employee, successfully negotiating a salary offer up by $5,000 could make a huge difference over the course of her career.
… Read More
Managing Expectations in Negotiations
Successful negotiators work hard to ensure that when they and their counterpart leave a negotiation, both sides feel satisfied with the agreement. Why should you care whether the other side is pleased with negotiations or not?
… Read More
Are Salary Negotiation Skills Different for Men and Women?
Most negotiators don’t engage in the kinds of high-stakes bargaining we read about in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, but almost every negotiator will need advanced salary negotiation skills during the course of her career to deal with a scenario that is, in many ways, the definition of a … Read More
Ethics in Negotiations: How to Deal with Deception at the Bargaining Table
You say you would never lie during a negotiation. Your ethical standards are solid—right? But imagine that after spending months looking for a new job, you’ve received an attractive offer to serve as the director of innovation for a growing start-up company.
… Read More
MESO Negotiation: The Benefits of Making Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers in Business Negotiations
In MESO, negotiation in which multiple offers are presented simultaneously at the negotiation table, effective negotiators seek opportunities to create value. By making tradeoffs across issues, parties can obtain greater value on the issues that are most important to them.
… Read More
Union Strikes and Dispute Resolution Strategies
When a conflict looms, it can be tempting for each side to try to make unilateral decisions on key issues because of the belief that negotiations with the other side will be a dead end. This dispute resolution strategy may pay off in the short term, but it’s important to factor in the long-term costs … Read More
Why Great Negotiators Earn More Money
What’s the best way to claim more money in a negotiation? Many professional negotiators would recommend hard-bargaining tactics, such as asking the other party to disclose their bottom line, standing firm on price, and threatening to walk away. But truly great negotiators recognize that using haggling strategies alone may leave significant money on the table. … Read More
Win Win Negotiation: Managing Your Counterpart’s Satisfaction
As the following points of win-win negotiation will demonstrate, ensuring that your counterpart is satisfied with a particular deal requires you to manage several aspects of the negotiation process, including his outcome expectations, his perceptions of your outcome, the comparisons he makes with others, and his overall negotiation experience itself.
… Read More
Make the Most of Your Salary Negotiations
What salary negotiation skills can you use if a potential employer asks you about your past salary? If you earned a competitive wage, your concern may be whether the new employer can afford you.
… Read More
Women and Negotiation: Narrowing the Gender Gap in Negotiation
Men tend to achieve better economic results in negotiation than women, negotiation research studies have found overall. Such gender differences are generally small, but evidence from the business world suggests that they can add up over time.
… Read More
Should Women “Lean In” to Create More Value in Negotiations?
Back in early 2008, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg began thinking about hiring Sheryl Sandberg, a vice president at Google and a former chief of staff for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as the social-media company’s new chief operating officer. The two met several nights a week for almost two months to discuss … Read More
Tough Topics in Negotiation: Negotiating a Non-Compete Agreement with Employers
In integrative negotiation, each side seeks to create and claim value with an eye towards the future of the negotiating relationship. One way of securing this relationship is a noncompete agreement: Employers sometimes ask potential employees to agree not to work for their competitors in the future but don’t assume such requests are nonnegotiable.
… Read More
Challenges Facing Women Negotiators
On the average, women often obtain less favorable or advantageous outcomes at the bargaining table when compared with their male counterparts.
… Read More
Crisis Negotiation Skills: The Hostage Negotiator’s Drill
Here are some negotiating skills from the world of crisis negotiations: Hostage negotiators stress the importance of discussing the “drill”—goals, ground rules, and operating principles—with their team before beginning talks with a hostage taker.
… Read More
Counteracting Racial and Gender Bias in Job Negotiations
This past July, the principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), Elizabeth Rowe, became the first Massachusetts resident to sue her employer under a new state law designed to address the persistent pay gap between men and women. Despite being the most frequent soloist among the BSO’s principal musicians, Rowe earns only about 75% of … Read More
Negotiating for greater equity and diversity in the workplace
In March, more than 700 Canadian doctors, residents, and medical students signed an online petition protesting their pay. The public health-care system in Quebec had been the victim of budget cuts, and the medical professionals weren’t happy.
But they weren’t complaining that their salaries were too low. On the contrary: They were angry that they had … Read More
Should salary negotiations be a laughing matter?
In salary negotiations, job candidates are often at a disadvantage relative to the hiring organization. Due to the well-documented anchoring effect, the first figure introduced into the discussion tends to strongly influence the final outcome. Unfortunately for candidates, the first figure mentioned in a negotiation often is not in their favor.
For example, when opening salary … Read More
Leadership Skills: When Identities Clash or Click at the Bargaining Table
Chartered Management Institute conducted a study focusing on the salary gap between men and women in an attempt to discover why the pay gap between the genders persists even when systemic changes were undertaken to prevent this from happening.
… Read More
Worst Negotiation Tactics of 2015
Here are some of the worst negotiation tactics displayed during calendar year 2015 – from hard-bargaining, distributive negotiation strategies aimed at getting the whole pie to stonewalling strategies intended to stymy the development of a negotiated agreement.
… Read More
Worst Negotiation Tactics of 2015
Here are some of the worst negotiation tactics displayed during calendar year 2015 – from hard-bargaining, distributive negotiation strategies aimed at getting the whole pie to stonewalling strategies intended to stymy the development of a negotiated agreement.
… Read More
Make the most of trends in salary negotiation
Several U.S. states have passed new fair-pay laws in the past year that could have dramatic effects on how salary negotiations are conducted in the workplace. Although the laws focus primarily on closing the salary gap between men and women, they have opened up a discussion about strategies that both employers and job candidates might … Read More
Successes and Messes: Ripping Up a Sweetheart Deal, Mid-Contract
The Kansas City Royals didn’t have to give catcher Salvador Perez better terms—but did anyway.
It was perhaps “the sweetest of sweetheart deals” negotiated by a Major League Baseball (MLB) team in today’s market, according to the New York Times. So why did the Kansas City Royals throw out their old agreement with star catcher Salvador … Read More
Dear Negotiation Coach: The Case for Backing Down
QUESTION
I have pushed pretty hard in salary negotiations for a job with a new company. In my last discussion with the HR person, he presented some convincing evidence suggesting that the high figure I tried to justify is off the mark. Given how hard I pushed for the higher salary, I am hesitant to back … Read More
Top 10 Celebrity Negotiations of 2015
Here are the top 10 celebrity negotiations from the year 2015. From integrative bargaining strategies to building bridges with counterparts in contentious talks, these negotiation scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborative, win-win negotiation tactics.
… Read More
The backlash effect for women negotiators, in Hollywood and beyond
Jennifer Lawrence was angry. The December 2014 leaks of data hacked from Sony Pictures revealed that the young actress had negotiated a significantly lower salary than her male costars for her role in the film American Hustle, despite being part of an ensemble cast. Lawrence (like the film’s other female lead, Amy Adams) was paid … Read More
Win-Win Negotiation with Bethenny Frankel
In this negotiation scenario straight from reality television, Lu Ann de Lesseps, Ramona Singer, and Sonja Morgan test their negotiating prowess against reality tv network Bravo in their contract renewal renegotiations. Skinnygirl mogul and financial whiz kid, Bethenny Frankel, offers a template for bargaining for success on reality tv and beyond.
… Read More
Team Building Negotiation Example: Chinese Women Face a “Sticky Floor”
What challenges do Chinese female negotiators face in negotiations in China? Like their counterparts in the West, female negotiators in China encounter barriers to doing business, but instead of a “glass ceiling,” many female Chinese feel they are rooted to a “sticky floor.”
… Read More
Tough Negotiation Tips from Jennifer Aniston?
Fans of the television show Friends got a treat last month when Netflix made all 236 episodes of the blockbuster hit available to stream online. At first glance actors Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston and the rest of the star-studded cast might not be your first pick to peg as formidable negotiators, but at the height … Read More
Women and Negotiation: Why Women Sometimes Ask for Less
The average college-educated woman earns $713,000 less over the course of her working life than her male counterpart, according to the Coalition of Labor Union Women. What explains this persistent gender gap? Women employees’ awareness that they could be penalized for negotiating assertively on their own behalf is one factor, according to new research from … Read More
In job negotiations, set yourself up for long-term success
When you enter a job negotiation, what goals are foremost on your mind? If you’re like most people, you are primarily preoccupied with making a great impression and winning the job. Acing the interviews can seem like the only thing that matters, especially if you’ve been out of work or desperate to escape a miserable … Read More
“So, How much do you make?”
Have you ever revealed how much you earn to a coworker? Your answer to that question may depend on your age.
Comparing salaries has long been a social taboo in the United States, but members of the Millennial generation—people born in the 1980s and 1990s— are changing that, according to Kevin Hallock, director of Cornell University’s … Read More
Fall 2020 HARVARD NEGOTIATION MASTER CLASS
2020 Programs
Summer Programs
Contact us: Call 1-800-391-8629 (outside the US: +1-301-528-2676) between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET any business day or email hni@law.harvard.edu
Articles & Insights
BATNA
- Business Negotiations
- Conflict Resolution
- Crisis Negotiations
- Dealing with Difficult People
- Dealmaking
- Dispute Resolution
- International Negotiation
- Cross Cultural Negotiations in International Business: Four Negotiation Tips for Bargaining in China
- Famous Negotiators: Tony Blair’s 10 Principles to Guide Diplomats in International Conflict Resolution
- How to Overcome Cultural Barriers in Communication – Cultural Approximations of Time and the Impact on Negotiations
- Best Negotiators in History: Nelson Mandela and His Negotiation Style
- International Negotiations and Agenda Setting: Controlling the Flow of the Negotiation Process
- Leadership Skills
- Collaborative Leadership at the Louvre
- Servant Leadership and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge
- Leadership Skills: Negotiating for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- Ethics in Business Negotiations and in Leadership: How Collusion Limits Value Creating Opportunities
- A Global Leadership Vacuum During the Covid-19 Crisis
- Mediation
- Negotiation Skills
- Negotiation Training
- Salary Negotiations
- Teaching Negotiation
- Cross-Cultural Video: Negotiation Examples, Lessons And Advice From PON Faculty
- Power Asymmetry and the Principal Agent Problem
- Boosting Active Engagement while Teaching Online: Pedagogy in a Pandemic
- Negotiating Identity and Values-Based Disputes
- Register Now for the Online Fall Negotiation and Dispute Resolution Seminar!
- Win-Win Negotiations