Good planning is essential for any negotiator, but women should be encouraged to plan for gender-specific challenges alongside the more routine planning that characterizes all negotiations. For women, it is especially important to generate broad lists of negotiable items and incorporate both gender-congruent and gender-incongruent items in their lists. It is also important for them to consider the reasons that a manager or peer might resist their proposals and to develop strategies for promoting their needs. In developing these strategies, and based on their knowledge of the individuals they negotiate with, they need to anticipate the moves that they might encounter and to plan how they can turn the negotiation. They might also assess their networks and other organizational relationships and consider how to gather the support necessary to support their proposals. Training programs can kick-start this process by incorporating planning for a forthcoming negotiation into the schedule. They can further assist by offering negotiation clinics and setting up peer support groups to help women think broadly about how to approach their negotiations.
CONCLUSION
Women and men to some extent approach conflicts and negotiations in gender-congruent ways. Gender differences are more clearly apparent in how women and men resolve conflicts, surfacing in more subtle ways in negotiations. As conflict resolvers, women favor more communal and process-oriented strategies than men. As negotiators, although women and men are equally likely to act competitively, only women incur the social costs of doing so. As self-advocates, women incur penalties for acting assertively; as other-advocates, women incur penalties for not acting assertively enough.
This chapter highlights the important role that social context plays in both modifying women’s and men’s strategies choices and shaping the reactions that those strategy choices elicit. To fully understand how gender affects conflict resolution and negotiation, we need to understand not just what strategies are used but the context within which they are used. Much of the research on gender has focused on contract negotiations. We have yet to explore in equal detail the role that gender plays in other kinds of negotiations: the domain in which negotiations occur, the role of emotional expression, and the impact of gender composition in team and multiparty negotiations are among the topics that would benefit from further research.
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