What is a Masculine Negotiator? What is a Feminine Negotiator? Depends on Who You Ask and When

Abstract

Universal gender-related social categories such as warmth and competence have previously been used to explain gender differences in negotiation behaviors and outcomes. By conducting a qualitative study and a quantitative study, we demonstrate that people's understanding of gender in negotiations is contingent on cultural and contextual factors, such as for American people, masculinity is about maximizing economic capital and femininity is about maximizing relational capital and this category have the same manifestations across negotiation contexts, whereas for Chinese people, masculinity is about maximizing relational capital and femininity is about avoiding so and this category have different manifestations across negotiation contexts. The results revealed that while Americans categorized aggressive negotiation motives and behaviors as masculine and non-aggressive ones as feminine across all negotiation contexts, Chinese people had a different pattern that depended on the negotiation context. In business...