How to Negotiate the Salary Using the Power of the Norm of Reciprocity

An employee negotiating his/her salary may perhaps generally sense a comprehensive absence of bargaining electrical power. If the staff lacks substitute work opportunities, and therefore can not make a credible danger to give up or just take an additional work, it is easy to truly feel that the offer you made by the employer is a consider it or depart it supply which the employee simply cannot impact at all.

The personnel or occupation seeker can having said that take gain of the regulations of human mother nature to increase his/her leverage when negotiating the wage. A person of these regulations says that just about every human being has an fascination in getting recognized as a deserving member of modern society. The only possibility to be recognized as these kinds of a member is to show that one is ready to comply with the simple norms of culture. Not to comply with these basic norms is to put oneself outside society, a condition that is unbearable to most folks.

The most elementary norm of modern society is the norm of reciprocity. According to Wikipedia, the norm of reciprocity is “the social expectation that people will react to every other in variety — returning advantages for advantages, and responding with possibly indifference or hostility to hurt.”

The power of this norm can be felt in most bargaining cases. Believe a consumer and a vendor are haggling in excess of the price of a motor vehicle. The vendor begins out with a bid at $24,000. The buyer finds this offer you unacceptable and helps make a counter bid at $15,000. Now, the seller lowers his bid to $20,000, i.e. he helps make a concession. In this circumstance, the consumer will most normally come to feel inclined to increase his bid, possibly to $17,000. The purpose why the customer will experience this inclination is mainly because of the presence of the norm of reciprocity. This norm now calls for that the customer responds to the seller’s concession with yet another concession.

The norm of reciprocity is so effective that it can be taken benefit of in pretty much any bargaining circumstance, even by a bash that if not wholly lacks leverage. This norm is a most effective ally to the employee or work seeker negotiating his salary – if properly appealed to.

The norm of reciprocity will only operate if it is extremely very clear that the worker tends to make a concession or offers some thing away to the employer. This can be made in quite a few ways. If, for instance, the employer has labored over time for months with no any compensation, he can say “I seriously do like this work. That is the rationale why I have expended several hours and several hours of extra time in this article. I believe it is only good that I get some sort of payment for my initiatives for this enterprise.” A different way is to commence out the salary negotiation by earning a higher but reasoned income claim, from which a concession can be built in the subsequent round.

With the norm of reciprocity in his toolbox, the employee or position seeker negotiating his salary will have significantly elevated his leverage.