Gender Salience in Electronic Negotiations

There is ample empirical evidence for the impact of gender in face*to*face negotiations. In electronic negotiations, the use of electronic negotiation support systems (eNS) implies important differences to face*to*face communication settings: (1) eNSs permit among other functions, revising, storing, processing, and transmitting information and (2) Computer*mediated communication reduces the transmission of interpersonal and social context cues. In this study, the researchers use a controlled laboratory experiment to analyze how the negotiators' gender, the gender*composition of negotiation dyads as well as the negotiators' prior relationship affect negotiation behavior in electronic negotiations. Their results clearly indicate stereotypical behavior of men and women in electronic negotiations: Overall, women give more information about their personal interests and needs and tend to be more yielding while men, on the contrary, tend to be more persuasive and competitive. When negotiating with a friend, men show significantly more integrative negotiation behavior while women's behavior does not change to a great extent. Finally, they find the gender-specific adaptation of negotiators to their counterpart to be relatively low indicating less gender salience in electronic negotiations.