As more women than ever step into the upper echelons of corporate
management, they're increasingly likely to pull up a chair to the
negotiation table. While many people come to the table with preconceived
gender expectations, they're bound to be mightily surprised. Women may go
about negotiation in different ways than men, but they're more than
likely to make everyone feel like a winner.
Women, for example, not only focus on relationships between
negotiators more often than men do, they also consider the history behind
the controversy at hand, reports Boston psychologist Deborah Kolb, Ph.D.
Contrary to what experts believed in the past, these differences work to
women's advantage.
Before, says Kolb, there was a tendency to focus on the ways women
and men were different--a "simplistic" approach by which equality for
women meant modeling themselves on men. But in the past few years, women
have begun to challenge the dominant culture of negotiation and make it
more supportive of the "feminine style," says Kolb, a professor of
management at Simmons College.
Women, for example, often pay attention to subtle cues that
indicate how well negotiators are getting along, unlike men, who focus
more on the task at hand. "When the relationships are good, women may
behave in ways" that strengthen the table's sense of community and abet
further negotiation, says Kolb. Men usually see negotiation as a contest
of wills.
Women's tendency to consider the historical context of the
negotiation problem can also help all parties at the table by enlarging
the frame of reference. Men, on the other hand, look at issues on an
individual basis, focusing attention on, but sometimes limiting the scope
of, the negotiation issue.
The differences may be related to how women are socialized to
negotiate in the private spheres of family and friends, but they are not
always gender-determined. "I don't think there is any consistent style of
negotiation" for women or men, says Kolb.
Nonetheless, women advance the "win-win" model of negotiation,
which values compromise over argument, benefitting all parties at the
table. It's time, Kolb believes, "to transform contentious negotiation
into a more emancipated form of conflict."
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