Enhancing women’s negotiation performance has shown to be a complex task as existing stereotypes diminish the effectiveness of traditional negotiation strategies and traditional means for negotiation training lack accessibility and scalability. To target these issues, this research investigates to what extent Negotiation Support Systems (NSS) can be leveraged to teach Strategic Empathy - a recently introduced negotiation strategy - to women and whether this can improve their negotiation performance. In specific, the effect of teaching Strategic Empathy by means of NSS was tested with respect to enhancing women’s main performance barriers: i) low self-efficacy, and ii) a lack of persistence. Based on a literature review, a tutoring system that integrated Strategic Empathy was developed and tested through the online experiment. The findings provided strong evidence on the effectiveness of using a NSS to teach Strategic Empathy. Women revealed significantly higher levels of perspective-taking and their understanding and use of Strategic Empathy was shown to increase over time. Also, a significant positive effect was found of Strategic Empathy on women’s self-efficacy. No significant positive effect was found of Strategic Empathy on persistence. The high cognitive load of the experiment and a lack of intrinsic motivation were suggested as potential causes for this finding.
Overall, this work demonstrates the applicability of using NSS to teach Strategic Empathy and its effectiveness for enhancing women’s self-efficacy in salary negotiations. By doing so, it contributes towards a solution to decrease the gender difference in negotiation performance. Moreover, it provides directions for future research as studies can build further on enhancing the system and experimental design, and deepening the understanding of the relationships between Strategic Empathy, confidence, and persistence.