Flirting Won’t Get You a Better Deal in Business
Contrary to popular opinion, flirting is bad business, according to a new study published by the Academy of Management
A common stereotype about women is that they are less effective negotiators than men – so much so that popular lore suggests women do well to bring a man with them when they buy a car.
In contrast, women are widely viewed as adept flirters; in a recent Harper’s Bazaar survey of 500 professional women, for example, 86% said they would “happily flirt with a male colleague if it meant they got their own way.”
But a series of experiments to be reported at the forthcoming annual meeting of the Academy finds flirting to be a money-losing negotiating strategy for women and men alike.
“Although lay intuition suggests flirting with one’s counterpart is a sign of negotiating effectiveness, the results of our experiments suggest that flirting at the bargaining table is not an effective strategy for claiming value,” conclude Laura J. Kray and Connson C. Locke of the University of California, Berkeley.
In fact, when it comes to obtaining a good deal, flirting has a “detrimental effect,” even though flirtatious bargainers, women particularly, are judged by their opponents to be more “more likable” than non-flirts.
In one experiment, Kray and Locke employed a professional male and female actor to negotiate via videotape the sale of a fictional biotechnology plant. Each actor recorded two versions of responses to buyers. Although both versions followed the same script, one was in a neutral style and the other was in a flirtatious style that consisted of smiling, leaning forward, touching one’s face or hair, and using a playful and animated tone of voice. The actors’ negotiating opponents – in reality 78 undergraduate students – got the point: even though unaware they were bargaining with actors, 85% correctly identified whether their opponent was flirtatious or not.
The actors’ responses were pre-recorded to reject three successive offers, so the variable of most interest was the buyers’ final bids. Subjects paired with the flirtatious seller made an average final offer of $17,540,000, while subjects paired with the neutral seller offered an average of $20,870,000, almost 20% higher. The female actor came up especially short, “receiv[ing] worse offers by both male and female negotiating partners when her style was flirtatious rather than neutral. In contrast, the male actor was only penalized for flirting when his negotiating partner was male.”
In a follow-up experiment to see if they would get similar results with face-to-face negotiations, the researchers recruited 158 students who were randomly divided between sellers and buyers of the biotechnology plant. The two groups prepared for the negotiation in separate rooms, and the sellers were given one of two sets of preliminary instructions. One set advised subjects to “be prepared, remain in your role, but at the same time act natural and be yourself”; the other instructed subjects to “be playful with your negotiating partner” but also to be “subtle enough that the other person does not know what you are doing.” Sellers and buyers then paired off in cubicles and were given 15 minutes to negotiate.
Again the price was significantly lower for flirtatious sellers — $21,510,000 compared to $22,800,000, a difference of almost $1.3 million.
While flirting did not prove a winning strategy financially, it proved to be a plus socially, at least for women: in both experiments women flirts were perceived to be more likable than women who did not flirt, while men were viewed as about equally likable whether they flirted or not.
Cartoon courtesy The New Yorker cartoonbank.com.
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