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Using a randomized controlled trial, we study whether a negotiation skills training can improve girls’ educational outcomes in a low-resource environment. We find that a negotiation training given to eighth-grade Zambian girls significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years, and these effects did not fade out. To better understand mechanisms, we estimate the effects of two alternative treatments. Negotiation had much stronger effects than an informational treatment, which had no effect. A treatment designed to have more traditional girls’ empowerment effects had directionally positive but insignificant educational effects. Relative to this treatment, negotiation increased enrollment in higher-quality schooling and had larger effects for high-ability girls. These findings are consistent with a model in which negotiation allows girls to resolve incomplete contracting problems with their parents, yielding increased educational investment for those who experience sufficiently high returns. We provide evidence for this channel through a lab-in-the-field game and follow-up survey with girls and their guardians.

Across the globe, women continue to be underrepresented in academic institutions and face several inequities. To redress these, many universities are acting to increase female student participation...

People in low-power positions, whether due to gender or class, tend to exhibit other-oriented rather than self-oriented behavior. Women's experiences at work and at home are shaped by social class, heightening identification with gender for relatively upper class women and identification with class for relatively lower class women, potentially mitigating, or even reversing, class-based differences documented in past research. Gender-class differences are reflected in women's employment beliefs and behaviors. Research integrating social class with gendered experiences in homes and workplaces deepens our understanding of the complex interplay between sources of power and status in society.

We investigate how structural features of negotiations can affect interaction processes and how negotiations can be not only a solution to, but also a source of, inter-organizational conflict. Principals, agents, and teams face different sets of constraints and opportunities in negotiations. We develop grounded theory detailing how the micro-interactions comprising a negotiation are shaped by the representation structure (principals, agents, or teams) of the parties. In qualitative and quantitative analyses of negotiations carried out by principals, agents, and teams in a laboratory experiment, we find that negotiators’ efforts to manage the constraints and opportunities of their representation structure are reflected in the micro-interactions, the broad improvisations, and the resulting substantive and relational outcomes.

We study the framing effects of communication on payoffs in multiparty bargaining. Communication has been shown to be more truthful and revealing than predicted in equilibrium. Because talk is preference-revealing, it may effectively frame bargaining around a logic of fairness or competition, moving parties on a path toward or away from equal-division agreements. These endogenous framing effects may outweigh any overall social utility effects due to the mere presence of communication. In two studies, we find that non-binding talk about fairness within a three-party, complete-information game leads toward off-equilibrium, equal division payoffs, while non-binding talk focusing on Competitive Reasoning moves parties away from equal divisions. Our two studies allow us to demonstrate that manipulated pre-game talk and spontaneous within-game dialogue lead to the same results.

Summary The aim of this retrospective review was to determine the feasibility, safety, and potential therapeutic effects of acupuncture in an inpatient infant population and to obtain data that would support the design of a randomized, controlled trial of acupuncture in infants. Hospitalized infants are often exposed to sedative and analgesic medications to facilitate intensive and invasive medical care. With increasing concern about the potential neurotoxic effects of common analgesic and sedative medications, minimizing an infant's exposure to such agents is desirable. Acupuncture can be therapeutic in adults and children, but data in infants are lacking. We performed a retrospective chart review of infants who received acupuncture during hospitalizations between 2008 and 2010. Demographic data, diagnoses, reason for acupuncture consult, ventilator settings, sedative/analgesic medication regimens, details of acupuncture therapy, and adverse effects were among data collected. Ten infants were identified in this review, seven of whom had agitation issues, two of whom had feeding difficulties, and one had both symptoms. Six of the eight infants with agitation had a decrease in the use of sedative and analgesic medications over the acupuncture therapy period, and four of five initially requiring mechanical ventilation were successfully weaned. One of the three infants with oral aversion transitioned rapidly to oral intake. Acupuncture therapy was well tolerated, and there were no complications observed. In this small group of hospitalized infants, acupuncture was found to be safe, well tolerated, and therapeutic. More studies are warranted to define the role of acupuncture in this population.

In this symposium, we aim to shed more light on gender biases at work and the ways in which women are perceived in traditionally masculine organizational cultures when they either subscribe to, or ...

Phenomenological assumptions—assumptions about the fundamental qualities of the phenomenon being studied and how it relates to the environment in which it occurs—affect the dissemination of knowledge from subfields to the broader field of study. Micro-process research in organizational studies rests on implicit phenomenological assumptions that vary in the extent to which micro-processes are viewed as parts of larger systems. We suggest that phenomenological assumptions linking micro-processes to organizational contexts highlight the relevance of micro-process research findings to broader organizational questions and therefore increase the likelihood that the findings will disseminate to the larger field of organizational research. We test this assertion by analyzing studies of negotiation published in top peer-reviewed management, psychology, sociology, and industrial relations journals from 1990 to 2005. Our findings reveal a continuum of open systems to closed systems phenomenological assumptions in negotiation research. Analysis of the citation rates of the articles in our data set by non-negotiation organizational research indicates that more open systems assumptions increase the likelihood that a negotiation article will be cited in organizational studies, after controlling for other, previously identified effects on citation rates. Our findings suggest that subfields can increase the impact they have on the broader intellectual discourse by situating their phenomena in rich contexts that illuminate the connections between their findings and questions of interest to the broader field.

Analyses relying on two international surveys from over 100,000 men and women across 29 countries explore the relationship between maternal employment and adult daughters’ and sons’ employment and ...

Deborah Kolb Kathleen McGinn Simmons College Harvard University Morgan Stanley has been hit, yet again, with a gender discrimination lawsuit. […] The suit comes two years after former Morgan broker Allison Schieffelin was awarded $12 million in her sexual discrimination suit against the firm. […] According to this latest complaint, […] “Morgan Stanley has engaged in a pattern and practice of gender discrimination with respect to compensation and promoting females.” Specifically, the women contend that Morgan discriminated against female advisers in terms of training, mentoring, assignment of accounts, participation in company-approved partnership arrangements with male advisers, promotions to branch manager positions and assignment of office space and sales support staff.

We propose a two-level-game (Putnam, 1988) perspective on gender in job negotiations. At Level 1, candidates negotiate with the employers. At Level 2, candidates negotiate with domestic partners. In order to illuminate the interplay between these two levels, we review literature from two separate bodies of literature. Research in psychology and organizational behavior on candidate-employer negotiations sheds light on the effects of gender on Level 1 negotiations. Research from economics and sociology on intra-household bargaining elucidates how negotiations over the allocation of domestic labor at Level 2 influence labor force participation at Level 1. In conclusion, we integrate practical implications from these two bodies of literature to propose a set of prescriptive suggestions for candidates to approach job negotiations as a two-level game and to minimize disadvantageous effects of gender on job negotiation outcomes.

In an experimental study, we investigate perceived relative power in negotiations and its effect on the distribution of resources and the integrativeness of agreements. We contrast perceived relative power with the objective individual level measure of power often used in past research: the parties’ alternatives to a negotiated agreement. We found that alternatives affected the distribution of outcomes, while perceived relative power and alternatives affected the integrativeness of outcomes. We found that negotiating pairs who perceived a smaller difference in relative power reached agreements of greater integrativeness than pairs who perceived a greater power difference, even after controlling for alternatives and aspirations. We explore the implications of treating power in negotiations as a perceived and relational construct.

Within a negotiation, when an act by one party is out-of-keeping with the previous moves and underlying logic of the interaction, the act and those that follow hold the potential for creating a transition to a new logic of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the presence and role of seven distinct types of transitions resulting from out-of-keeping acts across ten complex legal negotiations. The data reveal that a critical feature differentiating across the types is the abruptness/gradualness of the transition. We explore the combination of relational, informational, and procedural acts comprising the transitions and find that all three components are present across transitions, but in different proportions and orders. Understanding the role of out-of-keeping acts in negotiations facilitates a more complete picture of the microprocesses involved in the creation of critical moments in negotiations. Coordinated action is oriented toward and based on making sense of the environmental and social challenges at hand. At the heart of the coordinated action that makes up every negotiation lies an often unstated logic for the

Mergers and acquisitions improve market efficiency by capturing synergies between firms. But takeovers also impose externalities (both positive and negative) on the remaining firms in the industry. This paper describes a new equilibrium concept designed to explain and predict takeovers in this setting. We experimentally compare the new equilibrium concept to that of competing con- cepts in situations without and with externalities. Moreover, we examine the predicted dynamics of takeovers and outcome implications of those dynamics. Our experimental results support the predictions of the new equilibrium concept and provide implications for further empirical tests.

Complexity of communication is one of the important factors that distinguishes multilateral negotiation from its bilateral cousin. We investigate how the communication configuration affects a three-person coalition negotiation. Restricting who can communicate with whom strongly influences outcomes, and not always in ways that current theory anticipates. Competitive frictions, including a tendency to communicate offers privately, appear to shape much of what we observe. Our results suggest that parties with weaker alternatives would benefit from a more constrained structure, especially if they can be the conduit of communication, while those endowed with stronger alternatives would do well to work within a more public communication structure that promotes competitive bidding.

We use a sensemaking lens to illuminate the micro-processes underlying socially embedded transactions, investigating how social ties affect the logic of exchange governing the transaction. In transcripts of 87 two-party negotiations, we find that most pairs quickly coordinate a shared logic of exchange and improvise in accord with its implied rules throughout their interaction. The improvisations take the form of opening up, working together, or haggling. Negotiators turn to three dynamic processes—trust testing, process clarification, and emotional punctuation—when they have difficulty moving the interaction toward a coherent, mutually agreed upon improvisation. We examine in detail the few asymmetric negotiations, which do not involve a shared logic of exchange. Social ties ease coordination within the negotiation and nearly eliminate asymmetry. We explore how an understanding of the micro-processes underlying negotiations reveals the underpinnings of market exchange.

We offer a study revealing the mechanisms through which communication helps actual bargaining behavior outperform economic predictions. The possibility of individually strategic behavior in the presence of private information leads to game-theoretic predictions of less than full efficiency. We present a one-stage, simultaneous offers bargaining game in which buyers and sellers have independent, privately held valuations for the item being sold (i.e. a bilateral auction with two-sided private information). In three communication treatments, parties are: (a) allowed face-to-face communication prior to submitting offers; (b) allowed written communication prior to submitting offers; or (c) allowed no-communication prior to submitting offers. When parties are allowed pre-play communication, we find nearly full efficiency (98%). We examine two systematically predictable aspects of dyadic interaction—disclosure and reciprocity—to explain how negotiators achieve this efficiency. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study develops theory about the “second-order effects” of work, examining effects of women’s labor force participation on the subsequent status of females within their communities. We analyze ...

We study the process by which a professional service firm reshaped its activities and beliefs over nearly two decades as it adapted to shifts in the social discourse regarding gender and work. Analyzing archival data from the firm over eighteen years and representations of gender and work from the business press over the corresponding two decades, we find that the firm internalized the broader social discourse through iterated cycles of analysis and action, punctuated by evolving beliefs about gender and work. Outside experts and shifting social understandings played pivotal roles in changing beliefs and activities inside the firm. We conclude with an internalization model depicting organizational adaptation to evolving social institutions.

The aim of this retrospective review was to determine the feasibility, safety, and potential therapeutic effects of acupuncture in an inpatient infant population and to obtain data that would support the design of a randomized, controlled trial of acupuncture in infants. Hospitalized infants are often exposed to sedative and analgesic medications to facilitate intensive and invasive medical care. With increasing concern about the potential neurotoxic effects of common analgesic and sedative medications, minimizing an infant's exposure to such agents is desirable. Acupuncture can be therapeutic in adults and children, but data in infants are lacking. We performed a retrospective chart review of infants who received acupuncture during hospitalizations between 2008 and 2010. Demographic data, diagnoses, reason for acupuncture consult, ventilator settings, sedative/analgesic medication regimens, details of acupuncture therapy, and adverse effects were among data collected. Ten infants were identified in this review, seven of whom had agitation issues, two of whom had feeding difficulties, and one had both symptoms. Six of the eight infants with agitation had a decrease in the use of sedative and analgesic medications over the acupuncture therapy period, and four of five initially requiring mechanical ventilation were successfully weaned. One of the three infants with oral aversion transitioned rapidly to oral intake. Acupuncture therapy was well tolerated, and there were no complications observed. In this small group of hospitalized infants, acupuncture was found to be safe, well tolerated, and therapeutic. More studies are warranted to define the role of acupuncture in this population.

Environmental jolts and shifting membership challenge a group's efficacy and survival. Group identity is critical for a shared interpretation of and response to these challenges, but external and internal changes may require corresponding changes in a group's core identity. In a qualitative study of longshoremen in San Pedro, California, we observe an evolution in group identity as we track communication spoken and printed in the hiring halls, on the docks, and during casual social interactions. The emphasis in the shared language gradually shifts from safety and solidarity to safety, collaboration, and economic power. The newly developed language supports and shapes the longshoremen's identity and provides an interpretive guide for how to react to and benefit from disruptive external events.

We develop an integrated theory of the social identity mechanisms linking workgroup sex and race composition across levels with individual turnover. Building on social identity research, we theorize that social cohesion (Tyler, 1999; Hogg and Terry, 2000) and social comparison (Festinger, 1954) lead to well-known cooperative effects within subordinate-supervisor pairs of the same sex and race, but potentially competitive effects among demographically similar peers. Analyzing longitudinal human resource data on professionals employed in a large up-or-out knowledge organization, we assess the distinct effects of demographic match with superiors and demographic match with peers on the exit of junior professionals. We find largely cooperative effects of cross-level composition - junior professionals who work in groups with higher proportions of same sex senior professionals are less likely to exit. At the peer level, however, these effects are reversed, and professionals are more likely to leave as the proportions of same sex and race peers within the workgroup increase. The effects hold across demographic groups, but vary by majority/minority status, disproportionately affecting women and underrepresented minorities.

Phenomenological assumptions — assumptions about the fundamental qualities of the phenomenon being studied and how it relates to the environment in which it occurs — affect the dissemination of knowledge from subfields to the broader field of study. Micro-process research in organizational studies rests on implicit phenomenological assumptions that vary in the extent to which micro-processes are viewed as parts of larger systems. We suggest that phenomenological assumptions linking micro-processes to organizational contexts highlight the relevance of micro-process research findings to broader organizational questions, and therefore increase the likelihood that the findings will disseminate to the larger field of organizational research. We test this assertion by analyzing studies of negotiation published in top peer-reviewed management, psychology, sociology, and industrial relations journals from 1990 to 2005. Our findings reveal a continuum of open systems to closed systems phenomenological assumptions in negotiation research. Analysis of the citation rates of the articles in our data set by non-negotiation organizational research indicates that more open systems assumptions increase the likelihood that a negotiation article will be cited in organizational studies, after controlling for other, previously identified effects on citation rates. Our findings suggest that subfields can increase the impact they have on the broader intellectual discourse by situating their phenomena in rich contexts that illuminate the connections between their findings and questions of interest to the broader field.

Co-locating knowledge workers from different disciplines may be a necessary but insufficient step to generating multidisciplinary knowledge. We explore the role of assumptions underlying knowledge creation within the field of organizational studies, and investigate how incompatible assumptions across subgroups may inhibit the generation of multidisciplinary knowledge. While organizational studies research commonly assumes dynamic open systems with recursive influence between environments and interactions, studies of micro-processes in organizations often assume implicitly that interactions among organizational members are closed systems. We suggest that this incompatibility between assumptions may inhibit knowledge sharing in organizational studies research. We empirically assess this assertion by analyzing studies of negotiation published in top peer-reviewed management, psychology, sociology, and industrial relations journals from 1990 to 2005. Our findings illuminate a continuum of open-systems to closed-systems assumptions underlying this micro-process research. Analysis of the rate of citation of the articles in our data set by non-negotiation organizational studies research reveals that open systems assumptions increase the likelihood that a negotiation article will be cited in organizational studies, after controlling for other known effects on citation rate, such as outlet, discipline, length, number of citations and methodology. Our findings suggest that multidisciplinary fields can enhance their knowledge sharing by attending to the compatibility of assumptions held by sub-groups within the field.

Authors propose two categories of situational moderators of gender in negotiation: situational ambiguity and gender triggers. Reducing the degree of situational ambiguity constrains the influence of gender on negotiation. Gender triggers prompt divergent behavioral responses as a function of gender. Field and lab studies (1 and 2) demonstrate that decreased ambiguity in the economic structure of a negotiation (structural ambiguity) reduces gender effects on negotiation performance. Study 3 shows representation role (negotiating for self or other) functions as a gender trigger by producing a greater effect on female than male negotiation performance. Study 4 shows decreased structural ambiguity constrains gender effects of representation role, suggesting situational ambiguity and gender triggers work in interaction to moderate gender effects on negotiation performance. (This paper is a revision of RWP02-037.)

In this symposium, five papers explore the importance of context and/or stereotypes in explaining men and women’s organizational experiences. First, Fletcher and McGinn examine situational ambiguit...

A recent Forbes.com article states that “Women must take a special interest in supporting other women in order to help make gender equality in business a reality” (Perkett, 2014). But to what extent do women actually serve as catalysts for reducing inequality? As women now hold about fifty-percent of all management positions (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013) and are becoming the majority of new entrants in high-status professions, such as medicine (American Association of Medical Colleges, 2013), management scholars are beginning to examine the impact of women leaders, in particular, on gender inequality (e.g. Hoff 2010; Perkins, Phillips & Pearce, 2013; Powell & Butterfield, 2013). Given the pervasiveness of gender inequality in terms of wages, job segregation, and access to resources, for example, it becomes pertinent to understand whether women leaders provide a potential lever for reducing this form of inequality. Thus, our proposed panel symposium will address the following central questions: What r...

We study the process by which a professional service firm reshaped its activities and beliefs over nearly two decades as it adapted to shifts in the social discourse regarding gender and work. Anal...

This symposium presents counter-intuitive results that raise important questions about our current knowledge of negotiations. Five presentations document provocative findings that relate to teams i...