Negotiating is a core skill in any business leader’s arsenal, with major implications for everyday life as well. Leaders that can deftly negotiate a deal can achieve better salaries, career advancement, and build important relationships.
Those benefits, however, depend on one’s ability to secure a deal and avoid an impasse– a progress-ending stalemate that occurs in as many as 55% of negotiations. While the causes of impasses vary, their outcomes are often the same: lost opportunities for value creation, social and reputational costs that can make future negotiations more difficult, and wasted costs.
Research from Rebecca Ponce de Leon, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, may have uncovered a key to avoiding these costly impasses. In a study of more than 1,000 negotiations, Ponce de Leon and her collaborators — Anyi Ma, assistant professor of management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, the James L. Vincent Professor of Leadership at Duke University — found that, on average, women are more likely than men to avoid costly impasses at the negotiating table, thanks to their typically less-assertive and more relational approach.
The findings stand in stark contrast to thinking by some Fortune 500 leaders, such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently stated that corporate America needed more “masculine energy.”
According to Ponce de Leon, unilaterally “masculine” tactics can lead to impasses that are especially problematic when a negotiator has poor or no viable backup options if the current negotiation fails, i.e. a weak alternative. For example, when a job applicant has no other offers, their bargaining position is weak, and so failing to reach a deal with a hiring manager would leave the negotiator with nothing.
The key to women negotiators avoiding impasses lies in their tendency to be more relationally oriented, or more concerned about how they're coming off to the person on the other side of the table.
In one of their studies, Ponce de Leon and her research team watched nine seasons of the popular reality show Shark Tank, in which entrepreneurs pitch a business idea to a panel of angel investors, who then decide whether or not to invest. In their review, the researchers focused on behaviors that signal a relational orientation, including entrepreneurs’ emotional expression in their pitches and the extent to which they divulged personal narratives and stories. They found that women entrepreneurs – more than their male counterparts – tended to engage in relational behaviors as they were pitching. Women also were more likely to secure a deal with the investors than men on the show.
Ponce de Leon noted that "for years and years now, the narrative has been that women should behave more like men to get ahead and to be successful. But these findings illustrate that there is a place for more traditionally feminine and communal behaviors at work, and that they can be a source of strength and strategic advantage for our workplaces.”
This narrative, she added, only served to damage women's own self-efficacy and confidence. For leaders in particular, there is a need to “understand sometimes you should push and be assertive, and sometimes maybe you should take a step back and understand, ‘how can I build a relationship with this person on the other side of the table, especially if I have weak alternatives in my back pocket?’” Ponce de Leon says.
Ponce de Leon and her collaborators also ran a series of online experiments where participants engaged in a job offer negotiation simulation. There, similar to their Shark Tank study, they found that those with a more relational orientation achieved better negotiation outcomes, especially when they had weaker alternative offers.
Outside of negotiation scenarios, Ponce de Leon’s research offers an important insight into how relational behavior can be a strategic strength for accomplishing larger organizational goals. She highlighted the fact that relational behavior increases trust between people who work together and can be important for developing reliable professional relationships.
“Relationships are really key to almost everything we do in organizations. Increasingly, we're seeing work getting done in teams where building rapport, being able to trust one another is really paramount to accomplishing our goals and our organization's goals. It's important to not overlook the impact of building good relationships and understanding how you're coming off to that person you're communicating with,” Ponce de Leon says.
Key Takeaways for Business Leaders
- A more relational approach to negotiations can be a source of strength, helping negotiators to avoid a costly impasse.
- Women tend to exhibit more relational behavior during negotiations, such as emotional expression and sharing personal stories.
- Leaders should realize when to focus on building a trusting relationship during a negotiation versus negotiating as assertively as possible, especially if they need a deal to materialize or are building a long term business relationship.
