Who Asks and Who Receives: What Negotiating Your Starting Salary Is Worth

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Marks and Harold surveyed 149 people who had just started new jobs about whether, and how, they had negotiated their starting salary. Those who negotiated started on about $5,000 more a year. How they negotiated mattered too: open, assertive strategies, whether competitive or collaborative, paid more than compromising or giving way. And the biggest barrier to asking was not skill but temperament: people who disliked risk were the least likely to ask at all.

Paper: Marks, M., & Harold, C. (2011). Who asks and who receives in salary negotiation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(3), 371–394.
Sample: 149 newly hired employees across a range of jobs and industries.
Design: A survey of recent hires about their own starting-salary negotiation: whether they negotiated, which strategies they used, and what they were paid.
Predictors: Individual differences, including risk aversion and attitudes towards negotiation, and the negotiation strategy each person reported using.
Outcome: Starting salary.
Headline: Negotiators gained about $5,000 on average; open strategies (competing, collaborating) gained more than compromising or accommodating.
Access: Subscription-only. This article relies on the published abstract and on the figures the authors gave to the business press.

Most people accept the first salary they are offered. It feels polite, it avoids an awkward conversation, and the stakes look small: a few thousand a year. This study, by Michelle Marks of George Mason University and Crystal Harold of Temple University, asked what that choice is actually worth, and what separates the people who ask from the people who do not.1

What the researchers did

The design is simple. The team surveyed 149 people who had recently started new jobs, in a wide range of roles and industries, and asked them three things: whether they had negotiated their starting salary, how they had gone about it, and what they had ended up earning. They also measured individual differences that might explain who asks, including how much each person disliked risk and how they thought about negotiation in general.

What they found

Asking paid. People who chose to negotiate increased their starting salary by about $5,000 on average.

How you asked paid too. The strategies the authors compared are the classic ways people handle a conflict of interest. Two of them are assertive and open: competing, pressing for your own position, and collaborating, laying out both sides' interests to find a better deal for both. Two give ground: compromising, meeting in the middle, and accommodating, deferring to the other side. (The fifth, avoiding, is not negotiating at all.) The people who used competing and collaborating strategies, which the authors characterise by an open discussion of one's positions, issues and perspectives, did better than those who compromised or accommodated.

Who asked was predictable. Individual differences, including risk aversion and attitudes towards negotiation, predicted both whether someone negotiated and which strategy they used. The people most averse to risk were the least likely to ask, which means the cost of that trait is paid, year after year, in salary.

In a summary for strategy+business, the authors' findings were also reported to show that men generally came away with more than women, a gap the authors linked to long-standing pay imbalances, but that men and women did not differ significantly in the strategies they used.2

Why $5,000 is not small

A difference in starting salary does not stay the same size. Raises are usually a percentage of what you already earn, so an early gap compounds. As an illustration of the kind used when the study was presented to the press, take two people whose starting salaries differ by Δ and who then receive the same raise r every year. In the first year the gap is Δ, in the second Δ(1 + r), in the third Δ(1 + r)², and so on, so the total extra pay after n years is a geometric series.

With Δ = $5,000 and r = 5%, the sum grows like this.

What this study cannot tell you

It is a survey, not an experiment. The people who negotiated may have differed from those who did not in ways the survey did not capture: stronger offers, scarcer skills, more options. The $5,000 is what negotiators ended up with, not a guaranteed return on asking.
Strategies were self-reported, after the fact, by people who knew what they had been paid.
The sample is small and specific: 149 recent hires in one national labour market.
We could not read the full paper. It is behind a subscription, so this article reports only the findings the authors published in their abstract and described to the press, and redraws no tables.

What a speaker can take from it

Salary negotiation is a speaking task. The strategies that paid in this study are the ones that require saying your position out loud, clearly, to someone with more power than you: stating a number, explaining what you bring, asking what the other side needs. The ones that paid least are the ones that let the other side do the talking.

The study also names the real obstacle. It is not that people who stay quiet lack the words; it is that asking feels risky. That is exactly the kind of discomfort that shrinks with rehearsal: saying the sentence out loud, several times, before the conversation that matters.

This article summarises a subscription-only paper from its published abstract and from the account of its findings in strategy+business. The $5,000 figure and the ranking of strategies are the authors’. The compounding figure and its formula are ours.

Measured

Whether each new hire negotiated, the strategy they used and their starting salary, all reported by the hires themselves
Risk aversion and attitudes towards negotiation, measured in the same survey

Inferred, not measured

That negotiating caused the higher salary: the survey shows an association, not an experiment
The lifetime value of the gap, which assumes identical 5% raises for both people

References

Marks, M., & Harold, C. (2011). Who asks and who receives in salary negotiation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(3), 371–394. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.671
Palmquist, M. (2011). Getting a new job? It pays to speak up about salary. strategy+business, 62. https://www.strategy-business.com/article/11115