The impact of gender differences on response strategy in e-Negotiation

Abstract

Gender issues have been present in the traditional negotiation field for a long time, as it has become common for women to play key roles in business. However, few studies have investigated this issue in online situations. Since online negotiation is inevitable in the global business age and its context is different from that of a traditional face-to-face environment, it is valuable to have more understanding of the impact of gender differences on online negotiation. This study explores the impact of different gender dyads on how negotiators strategically respond to their counterparts' behavior from the dyadic interaction perspective. The adopted strategy clusters include (1) distributive information, (2) integrative information, (3) claiming value, and (4) creating value. The content analysis method was applied in order to translate all negotiation transcripts into quantitative data, i.e. behavior units. The resulting behavior units belonging to the four strategy clusters were mined to find the two-sequence dyadic behavioral patterns of each negotiation dyad and then of each gender composition group. Finally, these two-sequence behavioral patterns were categorized into three appropriate strategic behavioral sequences: (1) reciprocal sequence, (2) complementary sequence, and (3) structural sequence. The results indicate that negotiators' strategic responses to their counterparts were impacted by the genders of both the counterparts and the negotiators themselves. In general, negotiators in intra-gender dyads adopt more structural strategy and less reciprocal strategy than those in inter-gender dyads. No matter whether female or male, a negotiator will adapt his or her response strategy based on his or her counterpart's gender. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.