Next time your male coworker walks into a meeting and wants to get straight to business, you might want to tell him to rethink his strategy.
Next time your male coworker walks into a meeting and wants to get straight to business, you might want to tell him to rethink his strategy.
Fortune Magazine
By Caroline Fairchild
Published: August 5, 2014
>> Next time your male coworker walks into a meeting and wants to get straight to business, you might want to tell him to rethink his strategy.
Engaging in just a little small talk
before negotiations can give men a significant leg up, according to
a study to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the
Academy of Management. While women are
by no means penalized for engaging in the same form of chitchat,
men profit a great deal from doing the same.
"With men, because we are more
expecting them to be focused on the
outcome, we are pleasantly surprised
when they engage in small talk and invest in the personal
relationship, so they get the boost," says study author Brooke
Shaughnessy, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich,
Germany.
Women do not receive nearly as much
of an advantage from engaging in the same type of light discussion
simply because it already is expected of them, study co-author and
assistant professor at American University Alexandra Mislin adds.
In fact, small talk neither helps nor hurts women. As long as women
do not speak too "forcefully or rigidly" in negotiations, the
researchers found that small talk does little to influence the
outcome of a negotiation for women.
It's interesting to note that while
women can be
penalized for behaving in traditionally masculine ways,
the exact opposite effect appears to take place when men act
stereotypically feminine in the boardroom. A similar
conclusion could be drawn from a recent study that found
while
women are penalized for promoting women, men actually get a
bump up in performance reviews for doing the same.
Mislin added that a lot of men
can brush off small talk as unimportant, but her research
suggests that they can get a significant boost from something that
takes little effort.
Women likely could get a
similar boost from engaging in another communication skill,
but Mislin and others have yet to discover exactly what that
is. For now, we can rule out acting more
masculine.
What do you think about small talk
during negotiations? Email me at caroline.fairchild@fortune.com.