One of the scholarly contributions of our research is the validation and the innovative use of automated technology (LIWC2015) to generate an affective database of potentially increased accuracy and robustness for negotiation and
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
on negotiation and gender as well as the more specific literature on negotiation, gender, and emotion in helping advance the understanding on the impact of emotions on negotiation outcomes moderated by gender in general and of negative emotions in value claiming for female negotiators in specific. I also hope to have contributed to the literature on negotiation and gender, by parsing the effects of positive and negative emotion expressions on value claiming and creation by men and women, and by providing insights on the role of dyad gender composition on negotiation agreements. Finally, while the findings on the influence of negotiation dyad gender composition on value creation are not supposed to be interpreted as deterministic, I expect to have increased awareness to the importance of this unit of study within negotiation and gender research.
The practical implications of our research are that female negotiators may not need to enact the potentially taxing dual negotiation strategy of simultaneously improving their positive emotion language, while also reducing their negative emotional displays. Instead, our research indicates that female negotiators will likely improve their performance just by avoiding negative emotion language, not needing to worry as much about positive emotion language. In sum, being positive seems less important than being not negative. Even if a successful short-term strategy, conforming to gender stereotypes in any way only perpetuates them and can legitimately be objected to on ethical grounds.
This paper described an observational study without any manipulations; future research could attempt experimental manipulations to isolate and test
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
different emotion strategies for the different genders and dyad compositions. This research also points towards the possibility to increase the reliability of affective readings in negotiation and emotions research by adopting multimodal emotion recognition systems, i.e., using several different technologies to capture emotions, including words, facial expressions, voice, tone, pitch, etc. Research on automated affective recognition in computer science has already validated the superior accuracy and robustness of multimodal emotion recognition systems over unimodal ones (e.g., Busso et al., 2004; Castellano, Kessous & Caridakis, 2008; Chen et al., 1998; Chen & Rao, 1998; Datcu & Rothkrantz, 2014; De Silva & Ng, 2000; Huang et al. 1998; Metallinou, Katsamanis & Narayanan, 2012; Metallinou, Lee & Narayanan, 2010; Pantic & Rothkrantz, 2003). However, seeking the advantages of multimodal emotion recognition systems have so far meant the challenge of integrating the data output from each unimodal method into a single coherent and reliable output (Emerich, Lupu & Apatean, 2009; Kessous, Castellano & Caridakis, 2010; Metallinou, Lee & Narayanan, 2010). So far, such integration has required a multisensor data fusion (Chatzis, Bors & Pitas, 1999), which can become particularly complex if the technologies produce results on different scales and if the sources are non-commensurate, i.e., the technologies are not capturing and measuring the same physical phenomena (Hall & Llinas, 1997), such as audio (voice), video (facial expression) and text (words).
Research on emotion, gender, and negotiation have excellent potential and practical applicability in our usually highly ambiguous professional environments,
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
and value information learned through emotional inferences in the absence of other more concrete or reliable sources of information to decide on how to behave or even to evaluate their success in negotiations (Thompson et al., 1995). Expanding our understanding of emotions and their role in negotiations can greatly help negotiators make better choices as to what, when, where and how to negotiate best as well as the gender differences in doing so. A number of my initial findings on emotions in negotiations moderated by gender are still in need of better understanding of their boundary conditions and interaction effects. For example, is there a threshold beyond which the number of negative words is not just a risk anymore, but rather it starts to have a ruining effect (Taleb, 2018) on the negotiation? Could it be that small anger displays by female negotiators are non- significant in that they are discounted and not considered a gender stereotype violation, but that larger or more severe anger displays do create a serious backlash effect? In sum, avenues for future research here are quite open.
Similar to much of the existing negotiation and gender literature, this research validated gender differences in the influence of emotional expressions in negotiation performance. In particular, it found that women who use negative words in a negotiation claim less value, while it did not find any similar significant results for men. However, this being a single study, it is still difficult to conclude that negative emotional displays, such as anger, by male negotiators do not have a significant potential for an adverse effect after so much research stating their risks (e.g., more escalation and lower satisfaction) (Allred et al., 1997; Friedman et al., 2004; Kopelman et al., 2006; Van Dijk et al., 2008; Van Kleef et al., 2004a; an
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
Kleef et al., 2004b). While this means that we need more research to dig deeper into and hopefully clarify these important social questions, there is room for us to start promoting some social change.
For the last few decades, gender and negotiation have naturally focused on the gender differences in negotiation performance. Understanding such differences makes a lot of sense when we are bargaining and negotiators compete more than collaborate, as gender differences may at times give one gender an unfair edge over the other. Researchers in the gender and negotiation field have embraced the social responsibility to understand this gap and to help reduce it, including the gender salary gap or the relatively limited representation of women in leadership positions. While a commendable mission, I believe we are somewhat going about it the wrong way as we insist on a platform of negotiation through bargaining. We have been producing knowledge and thus teaching negotiators gender-based bargaining strategies or tricks to outdo their counterparties if they want to enhance their negotiation performance. Meanwhile, the negotiation literature has found that bargaining is a suboptimal, simplistic and adversarial negotiation approach when compared to more integrative and collaborative ways to negotiate.
In my over 20 years of negotiation teaching and consulting experience, focused mainly on helping negotiators learn and deliver negotiation results through win-win methods, I have found that most negotiators, female or male alike, fail or underperform when adopting more collaborative approaches for lack of knowledge
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
small survey to a mix of professional negotiators and MBA participants (N = 118). We found that roughly 80% of participants believed they negotiated collaboratively or win-win, when they were adopting accommodating strategies that mostly represented weak bargaining moves (Falcao & Komaromi, 2019). Not only that, but I also have seen in my professional experience that negotiators who adopted win-win approaches such as the principled approach from Fisher & Ury (1980) or one of its offshoots the value negotiation approach (Falcao, 2010), men and women alike significantly improved their negotiation performance and outcomes.
While anecdotal, my experience suggests that insisting in researching, comparing, learning and then teaching gender bargaining differences may be less efficient or effective for negotiators and society as whole than researching, comparing, learning or at least teaching win-win negotiation methods to both genders. The current literature on gender and negotiation can already help as it has many findings that point towards negotiation advice that can significantly help one gender while not significantly hurting the other in any way. In other words, is it possible that are perpetuating gender stereotypes and overburdening female negotiators with an extra layer of gender-based negotiation advice? Could we instead direct our gender and negotiation research and teaching both genders to negotiate based on the advice of what works for both genders? If the advice only works for one gender, then could we check if such advice is at least neutral or non- significant for the other gender? For example, while women may benefit from reducing negative emotion language in their negotiations to be able to claim more value, I cannot see why men cannot do the same. It does not seem to help or hurt
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
for male negotiators to reduce their negative emotion language when it comes to value claiming or creation, but it probably hurts the relationship and makes the negotiation process riskier (i.e., escalation). Future research could seek to validate further such negotiation patterns and begin a reframing of negotiation education for both genders.
There will still be room for the study of gender differences, as I believe that it highlights relevant issues and that it helps researchers find new nuances that may help or hurt negotiators from one or even both genders. I also believe that this gender-collaborative focus can reduce the gender-adversarial lenses and force us to look in new directions as it may free us a bit from the more narrow and stereotypical dichotomy of male vs. female, baseline vs. variance gender, or even has it easy vs. suffers the double-bind. The social debate is also likely to become less politicized, emotional or radical, and give way to a scientifically-grounded debate as men and women together attempt to find better ways for negotiators to find solutions to difficult negotiation challenges, including gender-specific ones.
After all, we are experiencing a feminization of management (Rudman & Glick, 1999) and the embracement of collaborative leadership and negotiation styles over the more limited command and control leadership or power-driven competitive negotiation strategies. Would such female-oriented gender strategies also not help men in such transition? In this wave of changes that include the #MeToo movement, feminization of management and growing efforts and
SMU LKCSB PhD in Business (General Management) PhD Dissertation
workplace. Hence, knowing to negotiate to reduce ambiguity or gender triggers, being able to anticipate stereotype transgression or psychological reactance, knowing how to stereotype regenerate when we are negatively stereotyped, understanding the value of persistence, the risk of stereotype threats, role incongruence, double binds, backlash, all seem equally good advice for men in most negotiation scenarios that come to mind. This advice seems to generate positive returns, albeit at different degrees and at no significant risk to either gender. So why make them about women only as opposed to the mainstream negotiation advice? What will happen if we direct our future research to build a gender-neutral, high- reward, low-risk system of negotiating? What might happen if we refocus towards promoting negotiations that deliver a fair, more unified and richer world? This may sound like a naïve call, but I prefer to argue that we never really gave this vision a true shot!