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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether women encounter more social resistance than men do when they attempt to negotiate for higher compensation, and whether the gender and personality of the interviewer moderates that resistance.

The authors conducted an experiment to explore how gender and personality jointly influence interviewers’ decision making in job negotiations.

The authors found that: first, female interviewees who initiate negotiations in a job interview are penalized by both male and female interviewers; second, more agreeable interviewers are “nicer” than less agreeable ones to interviewees who ask for more pay, even after controlling for the interviewers’ gender; and third, more extraverted interviewers are “tougher” than less extraverted interviewers toward interviewees who initiate salary negotiation. These phenomena are more pronounced when interviewees are male as opposed to female.

Some limitations need to be brought to the reader’s attention. First, the participants of this study are undergraduate students. While most of them have job interview experience as an interviewee, few have any experience as an interviewer. In order to minimize this effect, we used human resources management students who previously had a course on hiring and selection in this experiment. Second, the order of the interviewees evaluated by participants, acting as interviewers, could cause an “order effect.”

This study contributes to the gender, personality, and negotiations literature, and “fills the gap” on the joint effect of gender, personality, and hiring decision making. Gender discrimination during job interviews suggests that business needs to address discrimination and diversity issues earlier. It may be wise for management to consider the potential bias of an interviewer’s gender and personality on their hiring decisions before the organization makes a final decision on which interviewee should be hired and how much salary should be offered.

To the best of the knowledge of the authors, no prior studies have explored the joint effect of gender and personality on negotiation behavior in a job interview setting from an interviewer’s perspective.

The aim of this study is to examine how personality traits influence interviewees’ negotiation decisions as well as whether and to what extent such effects are moderated by one’s gender and risk attitudes.

An experiment was designed in which participants acted as interviewees and were asked to decide whether to initiate negotiations to potentially increase their salary and benefits. A logistic regression analysis and conditional process analysis were used to examine the effects of personality traits (agreeableness and extraversion) on the initiation of salary negotiation, as well as whether and to what extent such effects are moderated by one’s gender and risk attitudes.

A significant direct influence of extraversion and risk attitude on a job applicant’s initiation of salary negotiations. It was also found that risk attitudes moderate the effect of personality traits (i.e. agreeableness and extraversion) on individuals’ negotiation decisions. This study thus indicates that the effects of personality traits on job applicants’ initiation of salary negotiations are contingent on their risk attitudes.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the direct as well as moderated effects of personality traits on interviewees’ negotiation behavior in job interviews. The findings of this study thus significantly contribute to the literature in this line of research. Human resource professionals, as well as job seekers, may also benefit from the findings and implications of this study.

This study explores in the context of the use of the balanced scorecard (BSC) by management, whether the use of both financial and nonfinancial measures by top managers in their evaluations influences middle-level managers’ evaluations of their subordinates. This study uses a 2×2 experimental design where the subjects (MBA students) were asked to evaluate the performance of two lower-level managers under two different manipulation conditions. Subjects acted as middle-level managers of a hypothetical company. They were provided with the same performance information of two low-level managers under both conditions. However, under one condition, subjects were provided with additional information: the top management's evaluation style which used both financial and nonfinancial measures in their performance evaluations. No additional information was provided to subjects under the other manipulation condition. We also manipulated two performance information patterns of the two low-level managers. We predict that if middle-level managers are aware that the top manager uses both financial and nonfinancial measures in the BSC to evaluate their performance, middle-level managers would develop a mindset in which they will evaluate subordinates in a similar style, evaluating their subordinates on the basis of both financial and nonfinancial measures. The results of this study support the hypotheses. The findings of this study suggest that the contagion effect exists in the use of the BSC in performance evaluations.

The use of a balanced scorecard (BSC) for performance evaluation is meant to help evaluators make more complete decisions, as they have a variety of financial and non‐financial measures to assess. The problem is that users have difficulty taking all of the measures into consideration. The tendency to place more weight on common measures (measures that are the same across divisions) while either ignoring or placing very little weight on unique measures (measures are unique to a particular division) has become known as a “common measures bias”. The purpose of this paper is to extend a line of research that works to understand how this common measures bias might be mitigated.

This study examines whether the presence of task property feedback, a form of cognitive feedback, prior to a performance evaluation task, can help evaluators overcome the tendency to rely primarily on common measures. This study used a 2×2 experimental design where subjects were asked to evaluate the performance of two managers under either feedback or non‐feedback conditions. In the feedback condition, subjects were provided with their supervisor's suggestions about performance evaluation in the use of BSCs.

This study finds that when subjects were given task property feedback, a form of cognitive feedback, they tended to use more unique measures than if they were not given any feedback information at all.

In practice, more straight forward and simple feedback information is likely easier for companies to implement and easier for evaluators to follow. Feedback information that is too complex or that requires too much effort may frustrate evaluators, at which point they may abandon the effort. The authors' findings also indicate that direct and clear guidance from the top manager of a business may be seen as pressure by lower‐level managers. It is important for top managers to create such a performance evaluation environment so that all BSC measures are considered.

The paper finds that when evaluators judge the performance of managers through the use of a BSC, they tend to weight common measures more heavily than they do unique measures, unless they are provided cognitive feedback to cue them into the importance of using all measures. This study is one of many, following LS (2000), documenting a finding of common measures bias in the use of BSCs. Where this study contributes to the literature is in the use of task property feedback, a form of cognitive feedback, to overcome this bias. Since the use of unique measures is a key attribute of BSCs as they help users capture the nuances of a specific division's or firm's strategy, it is crucial that performance evaluators pay careful attention to them.