Dive Brief:
- How an individual was raised affects their negotiation skills, a new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management suggests. People from lower-income backgrounds tend to negotiate less successfully than folks from higher-income backgrounds, across work experiences, researchers found.
- The research also indicates a tricky “double-bind”: An experiment of more than 1,100 human resources professionals in the U.S. showed that the same negotiation request from a lower-class candidate prompted stronger social backlash than when it came from a higher-class candidate. Researchers called this barrier the “class ceiling.”
- The research is among the latest to show workers have a very different experience of negotiation based on their background and characteristics.
Dive Insight:
“Negotiation is often framed as a simple matter of confidence — if you want more, just ask,” MIT professor Jackson Lu said in a July 29 statement. Lu co-authored the report with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology assistant professor Ying Lin and Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Michele Gelfand.
“Our research shows that this advice may be misleading: Lower-class individuals are less likely to negotiate, and when they do negotiate, they can be penalized more harshly for the same behavior,” Lu added.
The report, “The social-class gap in negotiation: Lower-class individuals negotiate less and face more backlash,” included five studies involving more than 11,000 participants.
Researchers found that negotiation or lack thereof can affect a worker at every point of the talent cycle, from starting salary and benefits, to performance reviews and promotions. “Even small differences in who negotiates can compound over time,” MIT said in a statement. MIT analysis showed this phenomenon occurred “across multiple settings” — even among MBA graduates.
Research shows that gender is also a big factor in negotiation culture. A study of Swedish workers from the Rockwool Foundation Berlin Institute for the Economy and Future of Work showed that men tend to use external job offers to negotiate salary, whereas women tend not to do so. Interestingly, women in the study changed jobs just as often as the men did — suggesting that negotiation approaches were a key factor, as opposed to disparities in opportunities.
Likewise, a Cornell University report from earlier this year suggested that women feel discouraged from applying for jobs with a wide pay range listed because they may not feel as confident in their ability to negotiate. Researchers “consistently found that women show a stronger preference for jobs with narrower salary ranges compared to men,” with this preference being “associated with less assertive negotiation behaviors,” Alice Lee, assistant professor of organizational behavior, said in a March 4 statement.
In other words, through wide pay bands, the salary range mandates for job postings “are being implemented [in a way that] may be perpetuating the very pay gaps they were designed to close,” the researchers said.
Another lesser-known factor leading workers to stand up for themselves less is whether they’ve experienced a layoff. Per a late July report from Glassdoor, more than half of workers (57%) said they feel pressure to accept a lower salary in order to return to work. Even still, gender remained a factor: 63% of women said they considered a lower offer, compared to 52% of men.
