to $167,000, outdoing the men by 14 percent.
All it took was to tell them they were playing a different role. Instead of imagining that they were
the employee, the female executives were asked to imagine that they were the employee’s mentor.
Now the women were agents advocating for someone else. Interestingly, they didn’t set higher goals,
but they were willing to push harder to achieve their goals, which led them to better outcomes. In a
similar study, researchers Emily Amanatullah and Michael Morris asked men and women to negotiate
the terms of an attractive job offer. Half were instructed to imagine that they had received the offer
themselves and negotiate accordingly. The other half were instructed to imagine that they had referred
a friend for the job and were now responsible for negotiating on behalf of the friend. Once again, all
of the participants set similar goals, irrespective of whether they were male or female, or negotiating
for themselves or a friend.
But their actual behavior in the negotiations varied strikingly. Regardless of whether they were
negotiating for themselves or others, the men requested starting salaries averaging $49,000. The
women followed a different path. When they were negotiating for themselves, they requested starting
salaries averaging only $42,000—16.7 percent lower than the men.
This discrepancy vanished when the women negotiated on behalf of a friend. As advocates,
women did just as well as the men, requesting an average of $49,000. In another study, Amanatullah
and Morris found the same results with experienced executives negotiating: male executives landed
the same salaries regardless of whether they were negotiating for themselves or others, whereas
female executives did much better when negotiating for others than themselves. And Vanderbilt
professors Bruce Barry and Ray Friedman found that in short-term, single-issue negotiations, givers
do worse than takers, because they’re willing to give larger slices of the pie to their counterparts. But
this disadvantage disappears entirely when the givers set high goals and stick to them—which is
easier for givers to do when advocating for someone else.
Advocating for others was the key to Sameer’s chump change. When he shied away from
negotiating with his initial employer, Sameer was thinking about his own interests. With the Fortune
500 medical technology company, he put himself in a different frame of mind: he was representing his
family’s interests. Although he might be a doormat when he was responsible for himself, being a giver
meant that he didn’t want to let other people down. “I used it as a psychological weapon against
myself, to motivate myself,” Sameer says. “The solution was thinking about myself as an agent, an
advocate for my family. As a giver, I feel guilty about pushing too much, but the minute I start thinking,
‘I’m hurting my family, who’s depending on me for this,’ I don’t feel guilty about pushing for that
side.”
By thinking of himself as an agent representing his family, Sameer summoned the resolve to make
an initial request for a higher salary and tuition reimbursement. This was an otherish strategy. On the
one hand, he was doing what givers do naturally: advocating for other people’s interests. On the other
hand, he intentionally advocated for his family, whose interests were closely aligned with his own. At
the same time, he wasn’t pushing so far as to become a taker: he sought a balance in meeting his
family’s interests and his company’s. “My value system means that I’m not going to do anything that’s
wrong or unfair,” Sameer explains. “I’m not going to try to gouge anyone, but I am going to push to the
point that’s right and fair.”
When Sameer first contacted his new boss to negotiate, he asked for a salary increase and
reimbursement of his MBA tuition. This matched what other firms were offering, but the boss came
michael s
(Michael S)
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