Licensing Negotiation: How Credits, Credentials and Context Generate Behavioural Latitiude

Abstract

Women need to negotiate in order to secure economic resources, but their efforts to negotiate violate gender stereotypes and evoke backlash. This project integrates the negotiation, gender stereotypes, and psychological licensing literatures to understand how employees’ behavioural histories, and the behavioural histories of their employers, give employees psychological license to violate stereotyped expectations. This project combines laboratory and field methods to identify situations in which both men and women can negotiate economic outcomes without putting their organisational relationships at risk. The project’s findings will help employees to decide when and where to negotiate, and en..