Asking for Less (but Receiving More): Women Avoid Impasses and Outperform Men When Negotiators Have Weak Alternatives

Both research and conventional wisdom suggest that, due to their relational orientation, women are less likely than men to engage in agentic and assertive behaviors, leading them to underperform in zero-sum, distributive negotiations where one party's gain is equivalent to the other party's loss. However, past research tends to neglect the costs of reaching impasse by excluding impasses from measures of negotiation performance. Departing from this convention, we incorporate the economic costs of impasses into measures of negotiation performance to provide a more holistic examination of negotiation outcomes. In so doing, we reveal a reversal of the oft-cited male performance advantage when obtaining an impasse is especially economically costly (as is the case when negotiators have weak negotiation alternatives). Specifically, we predicted that female negotiators would make less assertive first offers than men due to their more relational orientation and that these gender differences in offer assertiveness should result in women avoiding impasse more often than men. Since avoiding impasses should improve negotiation performance when negotiators are able to obtain a deal that is more valuable than their negotiation alternative, women's tendency to avoid impasses should improve their performance when negotiators have weak (vs. strong) alternatives. These predictions were supported in eight studies (three preregistered) across various negotiation contexts, comprising data from the television show Shark Tank (Study 1), four incentive-compatible negotiation simulations (Studies 2 and 3, Supplemental Studies), and a multistudy causal experimental chain (Supplemental Studies 4a-c).