Conflict Zen

Here’s the latest research roundup, my periodic summary of research that gives us practical information for doing conflict and negotiation better:

When Seeing Is Misleading: Clutter Leads to High-Confidence Errors: This study found that people make more “high-confidence” errors when confronted with visual clutter. The authors believe that the implications of the study go beyond visual chaos, though. “If people find themselves confronted with multiple events in a chaotic, confusing environment, they may decide about some aspect of the situation and be totally wrong even though they have full confidence in their decision.” Seems like it’s reasonable to suspect that a tense or high-conflict environment may increase the chance that decisions are substantially less effective. And yet you’ll feel quite confident about that decision, poor though it is. Yikes! This may be pretty important information about the high cost of workplace conflict. [Read more...]

Here’s a great resource article by my friend and colleague, Diane Levin: “Leveling the Playing Field: Neutralizing Gender Differences in Negotiation.”

In her post, Diane links to an excellent Harvard Business School article, When Gender Changes the Negotiation, that I also highly recommend, particularly if you’d like some examples of the ways that gender can impact salary negotiation.

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

When I was in grad school 15 years ago, I had a button that said, “71¢.” A lot of men didn’t get it at the time, and a lot of women knew exactly what it was about. From what the Business and Professional Women tell us, I could now go get an equally depressing button: “76¢.”

In 101 Facts on the Status of Workingwomen, released last July, BPW concluded, “The gap between median earnings of full-time, year-round workers widened last year, with women’s earnings currently 76% of men’s, down from 77% in 2004.” For virtually my entire life, the gap has apparently narrowed about 1/3 of a penny per year. And women readers, if you’re over 35, the numbers are sadder still. [Read more...]

I recently had an experience that reminded me—hit me over the head, actually—that the way we think about a problem influences the solutions we can see or are willing to see.

Many of you know that I teach mediation in a graduate mediation program at Woodbury College in Vermont. The curriculum includes some online courses and I teach a few of them. My students this term had never, to my knowledge, taken an online course before and all of them had gone through our in-person courses at the undergraduate level. The online experience, with both its power and its frustrations, was new. Let me emphasize frustrations here, since that became front and center for some of the students. [Read more...]

For my readers in the southern NH region: I’ll be presenting at the February 27 Women’s Business Center roundtable, 6:30 p.m. at the Ocean National Bank Annex, 45 Main Street. The topic is Tapping the Women’s Advantage: Negotiation for Business Growth. Hope to see you there!