This study focuses on the negotiation process that partners in a couple engage in behind the scenes to negotiate whose career will take precedence in the household and the resulting effort and burnout that individuals experience at work and at home. The author finds that gender moderates the relationship between competitive negotiation tactics and an individual’s career responsibilities. Gender also moderates the relationship between both competitive and cooperative negotiation tactics and the emotional work conducted by one’s spouse or partner. The author also observes a moderating effect of gender between emotional and career effort and burnout—both from one’s job and from one’s relationship. Results suggest that men and women react differently to negotiation tactics used within a couple and tend to be affected by gendered norms regarding the work and family domains.

Marriage is often said to be the process of moving from “me” to “we.” This transition is especially poignant in dual-career couples because of the joint participation in outside work. Every day, individuals in dual career couples must make decisions together about their work and family lives: Promotions are accepted or declined when couples decide whether a job is worth keeping, work hours are increased or decreased depending on what a couple needs or wants, emotional support is given and received in response to the decisions that are made about work. This fact notwithstanding, the current work and family research tends to focus very little attention on how decisions made within couples can affect outcomes at work and at home. Though the ways in which strains spills over from work to family (Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, & Wethington, 1989; Piotrkowski, 1979) or from husband to wife (Takeuchi, Yun, & Tesluk, 2002; Westman, Vinokur, Hamilton, & Roziner, 2004) are undoubtedly important aspects of the work–family landscape, there are other aspects that have been overlooked.

Recent reports on the gender wage gap have suggested that young, unmarried women do not suffer the same wage differentials as married women do (Luscombe, 2010; Wolgemuth, 2010), but married men enjoy wage premiums (Chiodo & Owyang, 2002), suggesting that marriage precipitates some sort of gendered difference in workplace outcomes and employment trajectory. Marriage often precipitates adherence to—or at least recognition of—gendered norms in relationships (e.g., South & Spitze, 1994; Stafford, Backman, & Dibona, 1977), suggesting that women’s careers may be set aside for the good of the family when they enter into relationships with men who also have careers (i.e., become a dual-career couple). Because to get ahead in the workplace women need to put in the discretionary time needed to achieve success, the decisions that partners make about the investments they will make in their careers are central to the study of gender differences in employment outcomes.

How are decisions made about the effort one will invest into one’s career? Presumably men and women do not just magically fall into gendered roles—and the research on household labor suggests that a bargaining process occurs at the relationship level (Bittman, England, Folbre, Sayer, & Matheson, 2003; Brines, 1994). This “second stage” negotiation occurs over the division of household labor (Bowles & McGinn, 2008b), resulting in decisions about who will do what around the home. I adapt this conceptualization to propose that a similar type of bargaining also occurs between partners regarding the division of the career role. When partners are faced with divergent or conflicting interests regarding their career ambitions, they must negotiate the degree to which each partner’s career will be valued in the household and how much effort each will devote to his or her career.

Indeed, to experience work outcomes commensurate with the top men in industry, women must prioritize their careers and put in the extra work hours to prove their commitment to their careers. The intracouple negotiation of the career role might also explain the differential working hours that men and women report and the types of jobs that men and women take, as well as the amount of time that men and women devote to household labor (e.g., Hersch & Stratton, 1994). A lot of questions about the bargaining process itself emerge from this line of inquiry: If women use self-focused negotiation tactics, are they more likely to invest more time and energy into their careers? Alternatively, if they put their spouse’s career and support needs above their own, will they suffer career-hindering outcomes? In addition, though outcomes such as income and gender segregation of the workplace are critically important to the trajectory of research on women and work, less is known about more proximal outcomes such as stress and burnout. The current research thus also examines whether men and women experience different precursors to job and relationship stress stemming from the career negotiation process.

Relationship-Based Outcomes of Negotiation: Emotion Work It is not only the division of paid labor within a household that will be affected by negotiations over the career role; emotional labor between partners is also likely to be affected. Hochschild (1983) describes emotional labor as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display, suggesting that one must engage in active work to achieve an emotional display that fulfills a need. Although most conceptualizations of emotional labor have been concerned with organizationally required displays (e.g., Grandey, 2000), emotional labor is a critical activity within families and between partners (DeVault, 1991; Seery & Crowley, 2000). Indeed, Hochschild (1983) claimed that emotion management is an ongoing activity in all settings. Erickson (1993) first conceptualized emotional labor as emotion work conducted by partners in a couple. Specifically, she noted that though it is rarely recognized as such, providing emotional support is more than just “normal” marital intimacy—rather, it involves a concerted effort. Emotion work involves activities including comforting a spouse, encouraging him or her, and providing support, and it is also gendered (Erickson, 2005), just like other forms of household labor. Emotional support activities are seen as related to communality (Eagly, 1987) and thus are more strongly associated with women than with men. In a negotiation, though partners might be negotiating for specific outcomes (such as the division of career effort), they might also experience other outcomes as a result. I propose that the amount of emotion work that one’s partner partakes in is likely one of these “unintended consequences.” When women negotiate competitively with their spouses, their partners are less likely to invest effort in emotion work than the partners of competitive men because of the aforementioned backlash effect (Rudman, 1998). Specifically, when women utilize competitive negotiation tactics, they are enacting gender-incongruent behaviors and can expect to encounter a social penalty for their behavior to correct for the behavior and restore a gendered balance to the relationship (Coltrane, 2000). The tendency toward penalizing gender-incongruent behavior and the fact that couples routinely reproduce gendered norms suggest that a correction of sorts can be expected to occur if women act competitively. Their partners might reduce the effort they put into emotion work as a result. Alternatively, because men who enact competitive behaviors are not bucking a gendered norm, they may not experience any emotional-support-related penalty from their spouse for this behavior. In essence, negotiating competitively is expected from men and thus will not affect the emotion work of their partners. The opposite effect might be expected for cooperative negotiation tactics. Cooperative tactics are congruent with feminine norms of communality and niceness—and this combined with the gendered norms within couples suggests that women will be interpersonally rewarded for reproducing the expected behaviors. Men, on the other hand, might expect to receive interpersonal backlash in terms of less spousal emotional support for using cooperative negotiation tactics. Although this backlash may not result in a wife not partaking in emotion work on behalf of her partner (after all, giving emotional support is a gendered norm for women itself), it may not have nearly as much impact on her willingness as when a woman enacts cooperative (i.e., gender-typical) negotiation behaviors. Hypothesis 3 : The relationship between competitive negotiation tactics and the perceived emotional support from one’s partner will be moderated by gender such that the relationship will be more strongly negative for women than for men.

Hypothesis 4: The relationship between cooperative negotiation tactics and the perceived emotional support from one’s partner will be moderated by gender such that the relationship will be more strongly positive for women than for men.

Method Sample Participants were recruited from working undergraduate students at a southeastern university and by using contacts from independent data collectors (e.g., research assistants contacted working individuals of varying ages to complete the study). I purposively sampled for age and length of time in relationship to improve generalizability. Participants were invited to complete the study if they were in a committed, cohabiting relationship (e.g., marriage) and if each partner either worked or was in school. Individuals participated in three surveys over a period of one month. In total, 129 women completed the Time 1 survey, 93 completed Time 2, and 74 completed all three surveys, for an attrition rate of 43%. In addition, 96 men completed the Time 1 survey, 56 completed Time 2, and 49 completed Time 3, for an attrition rate of 49%. The only significant difference between the attrition group and the group that completed all surveys was that, among women, the leavers worked longer hours (42 vs. 32 per week) and were enrolled in less hours of classes (5.4 vs. 7.9 per week). For men, younger individuals were more likely to leave (29 vs. 34 years of age). There were no significant differences on the critical study variables. The average age of women in the sample was 29.9 years and of men was 32.2 years. Men were more likely to be married than were women (75% vs. 66%), but since marital status did not materially affect any results, it was not included in the analyses. Both men and women had one child on average, and men worked more hours and made more money than women did (43 vs. 35 hours; $59,100 vs. $36,500). Women were in their relationships longer than were men (9.9 years vs. 8.9 years). Both the men and women were predominately white or Caucasian (84.0% and 86.5%, respectively). Many different occupations and industries were represented in the sample. A plurality of respondents was in education (20%) or sales/insurance (17%), with 9% in both health/medicine and financial services, 5% in both IT and construction, and 3% in each of three industries: media, hospitality/travel, and law. The remainder reported somewhat idiosyncratic occupations such as jobs in the military, sports, or music. Procedure Participants completed three surveys at three separate time points—Survey 1 at Time 1, Survey 2 at Time 2, and Survey 3 at Time 3. Each time point was separated by 2 weeks to decrease the effect of same-source bias. Survey 1 contained demographic information and measures of negotiation tactics, Survey 2 collected emotional labor and paid labor information, and Survey 3 collected data on relationship and job burnout. Individuals had the option of utilizing a confidential and unique ID number if they were uncomfortable using their names on the surveys, and they had the option of completing online or paper versions of the surveys. Measures Negotiation tactics To assess negotiation tactics, I used a measure derived from De Dreu and Boles’s (1998) scale. De Dreu and Boles created a list of negotiation heuristics to assess how individuals prepared for negotiations that encompassed both cooperative and competitive shortcuts. I adapted this scale to refer to retrospective accounts of negotiation tactics used by individuals in their relationships. The questions were prefaced by the following guidelines: “Please describe the extent to which you utilized any of the following types of tactics while you were first negotiating work roles, for instance, whose job would be primary, with your spouse/partner.” The eight-item competitive negotiation tactics scale included items such as “Did you feel that your partner’s loss was your gain,” “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and “Winner take all.” Coefficient alpha for this scale is .84. For the eight-item cooperative negotiation scale, items included “Share and share alike,” “Were willing to compromise,” and “Played fair.” Coefficient alpha for this scale is .87. Descriptive and control variables Via the Time 1 survey, I collected demographic data concerning gender, marital status, length of relationship, number of children, age, prosocial orientation, and education. Work effort On the Time 2 survey, I asked participants what proportion of the paid work in the household they were responsible for. Responses could range from 0% (e.g., the respondent does not participate in paid work) to 100% (e.g., the respondent is the sole wage earner). Emotion work On the Time 2 survey, to assess the effort toward emotional support that a person has negotiated from his or her partner, I used Erickson’s (1993) “husband’s emotion work” scale, reworded to refer to either female or male partners. The scale includes items assessing how often a partner “Confides their innermost thoughts and feelings,” “Offers me encouragement,” and “Acts affectionately toward me,” among others. The 15-item scale has a coefficient alpha of .84. Job burnout I assess emotional exhaustion at Time 3 using the nine-item emotional exhaustion scale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996). Sample items include “I feel emotionally drained from my work” and “I feel burned out from my work.” Coefficient alpha for this scale is .95. Relationship burnout To assess relationship burnout, at Time 3 I used Erickson’s (1993) 12-item marital burnout scale. Sample items include “I feel burned out from my relationship” and “My relationship energizes me” (reverse coded). Coefficient alpha for this scale is .94.

Acknowledgements This article is adapted from the author’s doctoral dissertation. Thanks to Timothy Judge, John Kammeyer-Mueller, Lisa Nishii, Charlice Hurst, and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions on prior drafts.

Notes 1.

The dual concern model (Pruitt & Rubin, 1986) suggests four different negotiation tactics (based on two intersecting continua): self-focused, other-focused, avoidant, and win-win (simultaneously self- and other-focused). Because of their location at opposite ends of either continuum, I focus only on self- and other-focused negotiation tactics in this exploratory investigation of the role of negotiation on job and relationship outcomes. 2.

To further support the results using standardized interactions, I also ran the LISREL model using multiple groups analysis (by gender). Though the lower sample size of the male group reduced the degrees of freedom needed to exclusively use this approach, the coefficient patterns supported the results reported. 3.

Chi-square difference tests were not able to be conducted because the alternative models were not nested within the hypothesized models, but comparison of fit statistics supports the choice of the hypothesized causal ordering. The fit statistics for the first alternative model (M → IV → DV) with the same gendered interactions were χ2(df = 6) = 84.20, CFI = .92, SRMR = .06. The fit statistics for the second alternative causal model (IV → DV → M) were χ2(df = 6) = 41.46, CFI = .91, SRMR = .04.