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PART THREE
PERSONAL DIFFERENCES
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NATURAL-BORN PEACEMAKERS? Gender and the Resolution of Conflict
Mara Olekalns
Two males sit apart, staring at each other from the corners of their eyes. A female approaches one, takes him by the arm, and pulls him toward the other male. She alternates between the two and eventually brokers peace. In a different scenario, two males are again in conflict. A third male inserts himself between them, screaming at them or physically separating them to prevent the conflict from escalating. He keeps them separate and harangues them into submission (de Waal, 2009). Female as peacemaker, male as peacekeeper. These examples fit with our intuitions about how gender might shape the way that conflicts are resolved. Women, with their stronger emphasis on preserving social harmony, choose less confrontational strategies than men do. Men, with their stronger emphasis on autonomy and status, choose more assertive strategies than women do. What is intriguing about the opening examples is that they describe the resolution of social conflicts by chimpanzees.
In this chapter, I explore whether the gender differences that Franz de Waal observes in his chimpanzee colonies are paralleled in our human world. Is there evidence that women and men approach conflicts differently, and with what consequences? Two theoretical frameworks, summarized in figure 15.1, suggest that we should anticipate gender-based differences in conflict resolution. They represent the two sides of the gender coin. Relational self-construal theory, which proposes that women and men think about their relationships with others differently, underpins predictions about how women and men will behave. Social role theory, which proposes that we hold different expectations of how women and men should behave, underpins predictions about how we react to gender-role-congruent and -incongruent behaviors.
Figure 15.1 Gender-Based Differences in Self-Construal and Social Role Expectations
The first framework invokes relational self-construal, differentiating between interdependent self-construals, in which individuals recognize that they rely on the actions of others to achieve their goals, and independent self-construals, in which individuals see themselves as standing apart from others. Women are thought to hold more interdependent self-construals and, as a consequence, are more focused on preserving relationships with others. Men are thought to hold more independent self-construals that lead to a greater emphasis on the transactional aspects of negotiation and, as a consequence, are more focused on maximizing individual outcomes (Gelfand, Major, Raver, Nishii, and O’Brien, 2006; Gray, 1994). The different relational self-construals held by women and men predict different approaches to conflict resolution and negotiation. The greater communality and other-concern attributed to women implies that they will favor strategies that protect and preserve their relationships. The greater agency and self-concern attributed to men implies that they will favor strategies that protect and boost their personal outcomes.
The second framework invokes social roles (Stuhlmacher and Linnabery, 2013). Social roles contain a set of behavioral expectations for how individuals do and should behave: they are both descriptive (what women and men do) and prescriptive (what women and men should do). These prescriptive stereotypes convey the expectation that women should be more communal than men, displaying characteristics such as warmth and other-concern, whereas men should be more agentic than women, displaying characteristics such as ambition and self-reliance (Rudman and Phelan, 2008). This framework, which identifies the standards against which women’s and men’s strategies will be evaluated, gives us some insight into the consequences for women who violate role expectations. To negotiate effectively, women need to enact agentic behaviors that clearly violate prescriptive gender stereotypes (Kray and Thompson, 2005). Because these violations are experienced as negative (worse than expected), women incur social costs. When men negotiate, they do not violate prescriptive stereotypes because they are expected to act agentically. Should they decide to enact a more collaborative negotiation style, they get a boost to their social outcomes because they have a created a positive violation, that is, better-than-expected behaviors (Kulik and Olekalns, 2012).
Although sex and gender are closely intertwined, they are distinct constructs. Sex refers to our biological makeup, and our classification as female or male is often based on our observable external characteristics. Gender captures the sociocultural expectations that follow from differences in our biological makeup.
Both relational self-construal and social role theory reflect societal beliefs about how women and men will, and should, behave. The different self-construals held by women and men, and the gender-based expectations held of women and men, reflect the gender roles that have developed within specific societies. These sociocultural expectations follow from our physical makeup, based on the activities that women and men perform. The division of labor between women and men, based on their biological sex, thus
informs gender role expectations (Wood and Eagly, 2010). In conflict and negotiation research, although researchers derive their hypotheses from gender role theory, they typically use biological sex to signify gender.
RESOLVING CONFLICTS
The most common measure of conflict styles is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Style Inventory. Variations on this scale are provided by the Blake and Mouton Grid and by Rahim’s Conflict Style Inventory. Common among these scales is their placement of conflict resolution styles in a two-dimensional space in which one dimension assesses concern for self and one dimension assesses concern for other. This two-dimensional typology yields four conflict resolution styles: avoiding (low other-concern, low self-concern), accommodating (high other-concern, low self-concern), competing (low-other concern, high self-concern), and collaborating (high on both other- and self-concern).
Choosing a Conflict Resolution Strategy
Several studies, using a range of self-report instruments, establish that women favor more communal, relationship-oriented strategies than men do. Women endorse collaborating (Brahnam, Margavio, Hignite, Barrier, and Chin, 2005) and compromising (Holt and DeVore, 2005) more strongly than men do. They favor constructive rather than destructive approaches to conflict resolution (Davis, Capobianco, and Kraus, 2010). Conversely, men favor more agentic, self-oriented strategies than women do. Not only do they score more highly on competing than women do (Brahnam et al., 2005; Thomas and Thomas, 2008), but they are also more likely to use destructive rather than constructive approaches to conflict resolution (Holt and DeVore, 2005). In organizations, managers and peers (but not subordinates) report males as expressing more anger than females do (Davis et al., 2012). Although each of these studies used a different measure, jointly they are consistent with the intuition that women and men favor gender-congruent conflict management styles. The outlier is men’s preference for avoidance as well as competing (Brahnam et al., 2005), a preference that fits with a classic fight (compete) or flight (avoid) behavioral pattern.
The same preference for gender-congruent behaviors is also apparent in how disputants in mediation and mediators resolve conflict. Again, women favor more conciliatory, other-oriented strategies than men do. Two studies investigated how female and male disputants behave during mediation. In their analysis of thirty Israeli couples in divorce mediations, Pines, Gat, and Tal (2002) found that men adopt a more rights-based approach than women do, relying on legal precedent and rational argument to justify their claims. In comparison, women focus more on the relational aspects of the situation, stressing their contribution to and sacrifice within the relationship as a means for justifying their claims.
Further insight into the role that gender plays in divorce mediations is provided by Olekalns, Brett, and Donohue (2010). Using a word count program to analyze communication, these authors showed that whether mediations ended in agreement was more strongly influenced by what wives said than by what husbands said. Mediations were successful when wives avoided blaming in the first quarter of the mediation (using I more than you). Mediations were also successful when husbands converged to wives’ high levels of positive emotion but were unsuccessful when husbands converged to wives’ low levels of positive emotion.
On the other side of the mediation table, gender affects mediators’ style. Differentiating between an instrumental, problem-solving mediation style and a transformative style focused on enhancing communication between disputants, two differences emerge. Female mediators are more likely than male mediators to endorse a transformative style, and they are also more likely than male mediators to endorse process-focused interventions. Conversely, male mediators are more likely to endorse directive actions (Nelson, Zarankin, and Ben-Ari, 2010).
Evaluating and Adapting Conflict Resolution Style
The different expectations conveyed by female and male social roles imply that the same conflict resolution strategies, when used by women and men, may elicit different reactions. Consistent with this proposition, recent research shows that mediators’ gender is critical to whether impartiality or empathy plays the greater role in establishing a mediator’s trustworthiness. Whereas impartiality is a stronger predictor of trust in female mediators, empathy is a stronger predictor of trust in male negotiators (Stuhlmacher and Poitras, 2010), suggesting that disputants look for gender-incongruent cues to establish mediators’ trustworthiness. This finding is consistent with negotiation research showing that women are given greater latitude to violate social role expectations when they are in other-advocacy roles than when they are in self-advocacy roles (Amanatullah and Tinsley, 2013).
The social role construct highlights the importance of context more generally in shaping how women and men resolve conflicts. It hints at the role others’ characteristics, including gender, might play in shaping how individuals resolve conflicts. In short, who is involved in a conflict affects the relationship between gender and conflict style. Focusing on friendships and romantic relationships, Keener, Strough, and DiDonato (2012) found that in disputes with same-sex friends, both women and men were equally likely to use agentic strategies, but that women were more likely than men to use communal strategies. However, in disputes with romantic partners, women and men were equally likely to use communal strategies, but women were more likely than men to use agentic strategies. Focusing on organizational relationships, Davis et al. (2012) found that female managers’ use of active destructive behaviors (winning, demeaning others, retaliating) was unaffected by subordinates’ gender. Male managers used fewer of these active destructive strategies in their interactions with female subordinates than in their interactions with male subordinates.
Jointly, these findings show that both women and men tailor their conflict resolution style to the social context. An interesting implication of these two studies, and one that is ripe for further research, is that whereas women are more likely to adapt their strategies in a social context (friends, romantic partners), men are more likely to adapt their strategies in a professional context.
Summary
Three key findings emerge from research on conflict resolution styles. The first is that, consistent with the different self-construals attributed to women and men, women favor more communal and process-oriented conflict resolution styles, whereas men favor more agentic and task-oriented conflict resolution styles. The second key finding is that, consistent with social role analyses, the actions of women and men are evaluated differently: whereas female mediators gain trust through demonstrating impartiality, male mediators gain trust through empathy. The third key finding is that social context plays an important role in how women and men resolve conflicts. Studies to date suggest that women are more likely to take into consideration who they are in conflict with in social relationships, whereas men are more likely to take into consideration who they are in conflict with in professional relationships.
NEGOTIATING CONTRACTS
The persistence of the gender wage gap has motivated researchers to return to the question of whether the poorer economic outcomes of women can be attributed to differences in how women and men negotiate. Research over the past decade has shown that gender affects negotiations in more complex ways than by directing women to a more accommodating strategy and men to a more a competitive strategy. Instead, gender has impacts at several points in a negotiation (Babcock and Laschever, 2003).
It is clear that in terms of economic outcomes, men outperform women. Recent research adds to past meta-analyses (Stuhlmacher and Walters, 1999; Walters, Stuhlmacher, and Meyer, 1998), establishing that women are less willing to negotiate and consequently less likely to obtain promotions, that they perform more poorly in salary negotiations, and that when they negotiate with other women, they are less effective at value creation than men are (Crothers, Hughes, Schmitt, Theodore, Lipinski, and Bloomquist, 2010; Curhan, Neale, Ross, and Rosencranz-Engelmann, 2008; Greig, 2010; Miles and LaSalle, 2009). Although it is easy to attribute these differences in economic outcomes to diffe
rences in the negotiating styles of women and men, the evidence supporting this assumption is far from clear: Walters, Stuhlmacher, and Meyer’s (1998) meta-analysis showed that only 1 percent of the difference in women’s and men’s preference for competitive strategies can be attributed to gender. If there are differences in the economic outcomes of women and men, it is not because women are less competitive than men. This observation has highlighted the importance of understanding not just what women do but when and where they do it (Sondak and Stuhlmacher, 2009).
Self-Construal and Negotiation
Although women and men do not differ in their willingness to act competitively in their negotiations, how they plan for and approach a negotiation is underpinned by their different self-construals. The first point of difference is in the opening and closing moments of a negotiation. At both times, women make choices that are more consistent with a communal representation of relationships, whereas men make choices that are more consistent with an agentic representation of relationships. A recent study showed that whereas 42 percent of men are willing to initiate a negotiation, only 28 percent of women are willing to do so (Eriksson and Sandberg, 2012). Given this greater reluctance to negotiate, it is unsurprising that women are more likely than men to accept the first offer that they receive and to express more relief than men at having their first offers accepted (Kray and Gelfand, 2009).
Women and men also differ in the opening offers that they make and elicit from their opponents. Opening offers play a critical role in determining negotiators’ outcomes because they anchor the negotiation. Negotiators signal what is an acceptable outcome for them and also shape their opponents’ expectations about what it takes to reach agreement through their opening offers. Higher opening offers predict better outcomes. Compared to men, woman make less extreme opening offers and make offers that are more favorable to their opponents (Eckel, de Oliviera, and Grossman, 2008; Miles, 2010). Underlying these different opening offers, we find different beliefs about entitlements: whereas men believe they are entitled to higher salaries than others, women believe they are entitled to the same salaries as others (Barron, 2003). The more egalitarian attitudes of women appear to create economic disadvantage (Curhan et al., 2008), and as women’s relational concerns increase, so their economic outcomes worsen (Amantullah, Morris, and Curhan, 2008).
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