You’d think that fear wouldn’t be a helpful emotion to have swimming around your head when asking for a raise. But new research by Heajung Jun and Maia Young at UCLA and Christopher Bauman at the University of Washington suggests exactly the opposite, that being scared can boost a woman’s effectiveness at negotiating a pay increase. Unfortunately, fear doesn’t work so well for men when negotiating.

Why? Well their hypothesis is that men react to fear with a “fight or flight response”, whereas women in their study operated with a “tend or befriend” response. Therefore men were likely to avoid engaging in negotiations when scared, unlike women who sought to affiliate themselves with their interviewer/manager so they didn’t face the stress on their own.

Get the full article reporting these findings – courtesy of Jeanette Marshall who shared it on our LinkedIn group.