Moving outside the board room: A proof-of-concept study on the impact of walking while negotiating

Marily Oppezzo; Margaret A Neale; James J Gross; Judith J Prochaska; Daniel L Schwartz; Rachael C Aikens; Latha Palaniappan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0282681

. 2023 Mar 17;18(3):e0282681. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681

Moving outside the board room: A proof-of-concept study on the impact of walking while negotiating

Marily Oppezzo ^1,^*, Margaret A Neale ², James J Gross ³, Judith J Prochaska ¹, Daniel L Schwartz ⁴, Rachael C Aikens ⁵, Latha Palaniappan ⁶

Editor: Ricky Siu Wong⁷

PMCID: PMC10022808 PMID: 36930666

Abstract

Purpose

Negotiation is a consequential activity that can exacerbate power differentials, especially for women. While traditional contexts can prime stereotypical gender roles and promote conditions that lead to performance differences, these can be mitigated by context shifts. This proof-of-concept study explores whether an easy-to-apply context shift, moving from seated indoors to walking outside, can help improve the quality of negotiated interactions. Here we examine walking’s effects on negotiation and relational outcomes as well as experienced emotions, moderated by gender.

Design

Same-gender pairs were randomly assigned to either sitting or walking as either candidate or recruiter negotiating a job offer.

Participants

Eighty-one pairs of graduate students or community members participated: sitting pairs: 27 women, 14 men; walking pairs: 23 women, 17 men.

Intervention

Participants negotiated either while seated (across from each other) or walking (side by side along a path).

Measures

We measured: negotiation performance (total points) and outcome equity (difference between negotiating party points); subjective outcomes of positive emotions, negative emotions, mutual liking, and mutual trust. With mixed effects models, we tested main effects of condition, gender, and interaction of condition x gender.

Results

Relative to sitting, walking was associated with: increased outcome equality for women, but decreased for men (B = 3799.1, SE = 1679.9, p = .027); decreased negative emotions, more for women than men (IRR = .83, 95% CI:[.69,1.00], p = .046); and greater mutual liking for both genders (W = 591.5, p-value = 0.027). No significant effects were found for negotiation point totals, positive emotions, or mutual trust.

Conclusion

This study provides a foundation for investigating easy-to-implement changes that can mitigate stereotyped performance differences in negotiation.

Purpose

Negotiation is a consequential social activity that takes place in a wide range of contexts, ranging from everyday decision making to formal high-stakes multi-party interactions, each of which can highlight power differentials and prime stereotypically more effective and less effective negotiating behaviors. Physical environments in which the negotiations occur can also influence behavior, with board rooms and stereotypical business items such as briefcases priming competitive behaviors [1]. Situational triggers and role priming increases stereotype threat with more expectations of cooperation from women and competition from men [2].

Research has shown these external influences on negotiation to be modifiable. Altering advocacy, or having a person negotiate on another’s behalf vs oneself, and having multiple issues to negotiate vs one issue improves women’s negotiation behavior and removes a gender gap in performance [3]. Here we consider whether an easy-to-implement context switch can decrease the stereotype threat and priming of social role expectations associated with a common negotiation task, job offers. In this proof-of-concept study, we look at the potential impact of moving the negotiation, historically researched seated, facing each other, in an office environment, to walking together on an outdoor path, with both parties on equal footing. Specifically, we investigate whether walking while negotiating can make a difference in either the outcome of a negotiation or the participants’ emotional and social experience of the interaction, and how these effects might differ by gender.

Gender and negotiation

Research on gender and negotiation has found that while there is a small effect of gender and gender role expectations, context shifts can reverse these [3]. Performance differences can occur when gender triggers prime gender role expectations, stereotypes, and power differences [3, 4]. For example, women performed worse than men when reading that negotiation success was linked to assertiveness and self-interest advocacy and poorer performance linked to being emotional or accommodating [5]. Further, mere exposure to stereotypical business objects, such as a boardroom and briefcases, primes competition and decreases perceptions of cooperativity in social situations [1]. Women still have lower economic power, and job negotiation contexts prime these hierarchical gaps [6, 7]. One study showed if recruiter and candidate seated opposite a desk from each other with a difference in chair height, women negotiation pairs showed poorer economic outcomes; however, shifting the arrangement to be more egalitarian with the parties seated side-by-side mitigated this decrement [8]. Similarly, other small contextual shifts, such as when negotiations are shifted to have a woman negotiating on behalf of another [9], or the negotiation is integrative with multiple issues at stake [10], also mitigate performance differences.

Here we explore the impact of an easy-to-implement contextual shift of changing the negotiation physical environment by walking together outside. We describe below how this context shift may influence both objective and subjective negotiation outcomes, and when relevant note how these may particularly help close the contextually-influenced gender negotiation gap [3]. Fig 1 displays a conceptual map of how walking outdoors may improve negotiation outcomes. For ease, in the text below the concepts are bolded and the outcome measures for the current study are italicized.

Fig 1 — Walking-specific benefits are indicated by the orange color or tint, and walking outside together benefits are indicated by green color or tint. The small to medium effects of gender on negotiation outcomes are ameliorated by contextual shifts, therefore we expect the effect of walking outside together will particularly benefit women.

Cognitive negotiation benefits of walking

We chose walking as a physiological change to the negotiation context for several reasons. First, we wanted to investigate whether—independent of gender—walking might improve negotiation. Research has found that walking has many cognitive benefits, including two particularly relevant to negotiation. One is analogical thinking; one study found walking improved people’s abilities to make analogies [11], which requires identifying a common structure between two different ideas [11]. Optimal negotiation outcomes often require integrating disparate perspectives and finding common ground [12], as opposed to focusing only on a single viewpoint [13]. The second is working memory. One study found walking at a self-selected pace improved working memory compared to sitting [14]. Negotiating complex agreements across multiple issues requires keeping those issues in mind simultaneously. We choose a multi-issue negotiation activity with novel solution potential as a measure sensitive to these cognitive benefits of walking (performance measured by total points earned in the negotiation).

Affective negotiation benefits of walking

Walking has been shown to improve affect and mood. For example, a study on active workstations found increased psychological arousal, decreased boredom, and lower appraised task stress compared to sitting or standing [15]. Walking outside is also associated with an improvement in mood [16, 17]. Walking’s mild intensity and rhythmic quality as an activity may particularly benefit positive affect [18]. In negotiations, displaying positive emotions improves social and economic negotiation payouts [19], while high anxiety can hurt [20]. Additionally, women report disliking negotiation more than men; women prefer to avoid negotiation, and when they do engage in negotiation they report feeling anxiety and discomfort [21–24]. We measure both negative and positive emotions after negotiation to detect whether walking while negotiating mitigates negative or enhances positive emotions.

Walking together along a predetermined path increases behavioral and attentional synchrony. The common negotiation context is seated face-to-face, and in job negotiations, often with a higher-powered party sitting behind their desk or a table with a lower-powered party seated across from them on the other side of it; shifting to being seated side-by-side decreases power-differential performance detriments [8]. Walking together also has both parties side by side, with joint attention on the path, and increases behavioral synchrony, including speed, gait, and path trajectories [25, 26]. Behavioral synchrony has been linked to both rapport building [27], mutual liking [27–29], mutual trust [27–29], and cooperation, independent of positive feelings [30]. Even perceived synchrony has been shown to increase empathy [31], and can prime people to feel as if they are cooperating together rather than competing; this is important for sharing perspectives and may improve outcome equity, or mutual winning, in negotiation outcomes.

Finally, walking together outside is a novel, non-stereotypical context for a negotiation. As noted earlier in the section on gender and negotiation, primes such as seated face-to-face, or office room cues such as suitcases can prime stereotypical behavior of competition and prime differences in economic power (more for women) [3–6]. Active, non-sedentary work environments are also linked to reduced feelings of territoriality [32], which primes competition and zero-sum behaviors in negotiation. Indoors face-to-face with negotiation can prime the negative experience of negotiation women report disliking [21]. Finally, environments that prime competition lead to less cooperative, value-creation in negotiations, and competitive negotiation behaviors are associated with less mutual trust [33]. We expected walking outside on common ground to remove the stereotype threat cues towards competition and power, which might increase cooperative behavior to improve both outcome equity and pair rapport (measured by mutual liking and mutual trust).

The present study

The goal of this study was to investigate whether walking outside (compared to sitting inside) would improve several negotiation-related outcomes, and to explore the potential for differential effects of walking while negotiating by gender. We randomly assigned same-gender pairs to either sitting across from each other indoors or walking side by side outside performing the “New Recruit,” a multi-issue job negotiation exercise with a candidate and recruiter. We measured both objective negotiation outcomes, total points and outcome equity, as well as subjective negotiation outcomes of individual emotions (negative and positive emotions) and pair rapport (mutual liking and mutual trust). Our overall hypothesis was that walking would enhance objective and subjective negotiation outcomes, and that this effect would be particularly enhanced for women. Specifically, we hypothesized that compared to negotiating sitting together inside, negotiating when walking together when outside would lead to improvement in: objective negotiation outcomes of total points (H1) and outcome equity (H2); subjective individual negotiation outcomes of negative emotions (H3a) and positive emotions (H3b); and subjective pair outcomes of mutual liking (H4a) and mutual trust (H4b). For each outcome, we expected effects of walking compared to sitting to be greater for women pairs than men pairs.

Methods

Design and hypotheses

In a between-groups design, same-gender pairs were randomly assigned to either sitting or walking conditions, and randomly assigned to a role of either candidate or recruiter in a multiple-issue job negotiation exercise, “New Recruit” [34]. Same gender pairs were employed to maximize power to detect hypothesized gender effects (versus complex effects of mixed gender dyads) [21] We measured both objective and subjective negotiation outcomes. The New Recruit measure has role-specific point payouts for each of eight different issues within the negotiation task. Objective outcomes, related to negotiation performance, include: total points which the pair earned together (pair); and the outcome equity, or distribution of these points between the individual parties serving as a proxy for the difference in power (pair). Subjective outcomes, both individual and social, include: negative emotions and positive emotions (individual); and mutual liking and mutual trust within the pair (pair). For each negotiation outcome, we looked for the main effect of condition (sitting vs walking), the main effect of pair gender (men vs women), and the interaction (condition x gender).

Ethics statement

The Stanford University Institutional Review Board approved this study, and all participants signed a consent form prior to participation.

Sample

From a graduate business school participant pool, 286 eligible participants signed up, with 86 cancellations, and 19 pairs excluded due to participants having done the activity before in a class, not complying with study protocol, or knowing their counterpart personally. The latter was a reason for exclusion because we did not a priori assess or randomize participants based on knowing each other, which would influence the relational outcomes of mutual liking and mutual trust. We also wanted to isolate the effects of walking independent of prior relationship (and did not have a pre-test measure to assess change). Final analyses used 162 adults (81 negotiating pairs: 31 men, 50 women).

Intervention

Procedure

Participants were run as pairs, randomly assigned on a 1:1 basis to either the walking or sitting condition, and then role (candidate or recruiter) via online random number generator (random.org). After written informed consent, participants were given the negotiation packets for their role, and shown a video describing the task rules of engagement (e.g., do not share individual point payout values with the other participant). They then were given ten minutes to read and become familiar with their priorities, after which condition-specific instructions were provided.

Each pair was given 30 minutes to complete the negotiation, with clipboards to hold their packets, folders to cover up pay out schedules, and timers, set for both a five-minute warning and the 30-minute mark at which to stop. If they completed the negotiation early, they were asked to pause the timer and alert the experimenter.

Sitting condition participants sat across from each other, face-to-face in a room, with a table in between them. All sitting conditions were run in the same room. Walking condition participants were given a map of a 15-minute walking loop outside to follow. The loop was on the university campus which is a mix of trees, university buildings, alternate walking paths, and people. Variations in busy-ness, sunshine, and temperature occurred in the outdoor walking condition.

After the negotiation, each participant took the ten-minute post-survey, was compensated $25, and debriefed.

Negotiation task

The negotiation activity was the “New Recruit” task, an 8-issue, dyadic, simulated job offer exercise in which one person plays the role of a recruiter and another, the candidate [34]. Parties must agree on eight issues: two “fixed-sum” issues where parties’ pay out are mutually opposing (one party’s gain comes at the other’s loss); two congruent issues, or “value sharing” issues where parties’ interests are aligned (both parties want the same thing); and four integrative, or “value-creating” issues where parties can make trade-offs to create value and earn more points through pairing issues with asymmetric payouts. Reaching optimal agreement depends upon information sharing and cooperation. The measure is suited for determining if the cognitive benefits of walking could extend to negotiation in two ways. First, finding a novel way to package multiple issues may capture the creative benefits of walking. Second, maintaining multiple issues and points of view may capture walking’s working memory benefits.

The exercise affords various performance measures; we assess the overall performance by the total pair points, and the equality or fairness of outcome by point distribution, or subtracting the individual point totals from each other (e.g., of 10,000 total points how even was the split between recruiter and candidate).

Measures

Objective negotiation outcomes

Total points (Pair, hypothesis 1). A pair or individual’s points could range from -8400 to 13,200, summing the outcomes for all issues for both parties at the pair level.

Outcome equity (Pair, hypothesis 2). The difference between each participant within the pairs score (candidate total subtracted from recruiter total) measured the equality of the final contract and served as a proxy for the power differential of the outcome and between the two parties. Differences closer to zero indicate more equal distribution of the point payout. A very unequal distribution of points, or a large difference, suggests more objective power differential, where one party took more at the other party’s expense.

Subjective negotiation outcomes

Negative and positive emotions (Individual, hypotheses 3a and 3b). To test the emotional impact of walking during negotiation, we measured both positive and negative emotions. Negative (17) and positive (7) emotions were evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale from not at all to extremely, using emotion words from the short form of the Profile of Mood States [35] and a subset of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule [36]. Negative emotion ratings and positive emotion ratings were averaged for each individual.

Mutual liking and mutual trust (Pair, hypothesis 4a and 4b). On a five-point Likert scale from not at all to extremely, participants were asked the following questions: 1. How much did negotiating with your negotiation partner make you feel a sense of liking for them? 2. How much do you trust your negotiation partner? These questions represented liking and trust, respectively. To reflect mutual, pair liking and trust, these individual scores were averaged.

Data analysis plan

For each negotiation outcome, we tested the main effect of condition (sitting vs walking), the main effect of gender (men vs women), and whether the effect of condition differed by gender. Total points, outcome equity, mutual liking, and mutual trust were analyzed at the pair level. For normally distributed continuous outcome of outcome equity, we used linear regression with condition, gender, and condition x gender as predictors. For the non-normally distributed ordinal outcomes of total points, mutual liking, and mutual trust, we used non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test for condition, and then sub-analyses for the effect of condition for each gender. The Mann-Whitney U is a robust test which does not require normal distribution assumptions and works for ordinal data such as Likert scales used for the mutual liking and trust outcomes.

Positive and negative emotions were analyzed at the individual level using hierarchical linear modeling [37]. A random intercept for pair was included to model nonindependence within the pair. For the continuous, Poisson-distributed negative and positive emotions (individual), we used linear mixed effects models including fixed effects for condition, gender, and condition x gender, and a random intercept for pair, with R’s glmer function, specifying a Poisson error distribution and a log link function. All data were analyzed using R [38] using the stats and lme4 [39] packages.

Results

Sample demographics

The participant pool is largely drawn from the student population. Of the original pool of 200 adults who participated in the current study, 180 provided demographic data. Race/Ethnicity percentages were as follows: 32.8% (n = 59) Caucasian, 20.6% (n = 37) East Asian American, 12.8% (n = 23) Multiracial, 12.2% (n = 22) Hispanic, 11.1% (n = 20) African American, 7.2% (n = 13) South Asian American, and 3.3% (n = 6) Other. The pool was 91.7% students, with the remaining unspecified either as alumni or other participants from the community. Demographic data was only provided at screening and not linked to outcome.

The mean (SD) of the total points for the entire sample was 9995 (1952.7), and the data for this outcome was non-normally distributed; therefore non-parametric analyses were used.

Objective negotiation outcomes

Total points (Hypotheses 1)

Using the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the total points between pairs who walked vs pairs who sat, we found no main effect of condition, W = 769.5, p = .63. The Hodges-Lehmann, a nonparametric estimate for effect size, = -.0000057, 95% CI: [–1200, 600]. The subgroup analyses comparing total points between conditions was not significant for women pairs, W = 285, p = .60. Hodges-Lehmann = -.000026, 95% CI: [–1200, 600]; or for men pairs, W = 117.5, p = .97. Hodges-Lehmann = -.000032, 95% CI: [–1200, 1200]. While walking had no significant effect on total points compared to sitting, the means were in the predicted direction: means and standard errors for sitting pairs: 9795.0 (332.9); walking pairs:10190.2 (280.5).

Outcome equity (Pair, hypothesis 2)

Multiple regression analysis was used to test whether condition, gender, or condition x gender significantly predicted the outcome equity. There were no main effects of condition (B = -1839.5, SE = 1321.8, p = .17) or gender (B = -2041.8, SE = 978.9, p = .57). The interaction of condition x gender (B = 3799.1, SE = 1679.9, p = .0266) was a significant predictor. Means and SEs are shown in Fig 2. Walking significantly increased the outcome equity between the roles within a pair for women, however walking significantly decreased the difference for men.

Fig 2 — *Note*: Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean. Closer to zero, or lower values of the differences, indicates more equal distribution of points within the pair.

Subjective negotiation outcomes

Negative emotions (Hypothesis 3a)

The linear mixed model showed no main effects for either condition (IRR = 1.07, 95% CI: [.93,1.23], p = .36) or gender (IRR = 1.06, 95% CI: [.93,1.22], p = .33), but did show a significant interaction between condition and gender (IRR = .83, 95% CI: [.69, 1.00], p = .0456). For women, negative emotions were lower for those who walked compared to those who sat; for men, negative emotions were higher for men who walked (Fig 3).

Fig 3 — *Note*: The means reflect estimated marginal means. Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean.

Positive emotions (Hypothesis 3b)

The linear mixed model showed a significant main effect of gender (IRR = .81, 95% CI: [.69-.95], p = .0103), but no significant main effect of condition (IRR = .99, 95% CI: [.83–1.18], p = .937) or significant interaction of condition and gender (B = 1.06, 95% CI: [.84–1.32], p = .618). Regardless of condition, men reported significantly higher positive emotions than did women (Fig 4).

Fig 4 — *Note*: The means reflect estimated marginal means. Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean.

Mutual liking (Hypothesis 4a)

Using the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the average liking between pairs who walked vs pairs who sat, we found a main effect of condition, W = 591.5, p-value = 0.027. The Hodges-Lehmann, non-parametric estimate of effect size = -.50, 95% CI: [-.50, -.000059]. The interpretation of the Hodges-Lehmann is a difference in the medians of the two groups, indicating the difference in mutual liking between those who walked and those who sat was about ½ point on the Likert scale. The subgroup analyses comparing point performance between conditions for women pairs was not significant, W = 253.5, p-value = 0.2505. Hodges-Lehmann = -0.50, 95% CI: [-.050, -.000031], but for men pairs it was significant, W = 68.5, p-value = .03884. Hodges-Lehmann =.-0.50, 95% CI: [-1.0, -.0000027]. Fig 5A shows means and standard errors of average liking, indicating that for both genders walking increased the average liking.

Fig 5 — a. Mutual Liking x Condition x Gender. *Note*: Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean. b. Mutual Trust x Condition x Gender. *Note*: Error bars reflect standard errors of the mean.

Mutual trust (Hypothesis 4b)

Using the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the average trust points between pairs who walked vs pairs who sat, we found a main effect of condition, W = 737, p-value = 0.4249. The subgroup analyses comparing average trust between conditions for women, W = 271.5, p-value = 0.4273 and for men, W = 114, p-value = .8532 was not significant in either case.

Using the Mann-Whitney U test to compare the average trust points by gender. Here, we found a main effect for gender, W = 999, p = .02616, Hodges-Lehmann = .50, 95%CI: [.00007, .5]; this indicates that the men pairs, compared to women pairs, had on average higher mutual trust by ½ a Likert scale point. The subgroup analyses comparing average trust between gender for those sitting, W = 232, p = .1515, Hodges-Lehmann = .50, 95%CI: [-.000043, 1.0], and those walking, W = 263.5, p = .1049, Hodges-Lehmann = .50, 95%CI: -.000021,.05], was not significant. Fig 5B shows that men pairs had higher trust than female pairs, regardless of condition.

Discussion

Walking together has been suggested to benefit some social processes. (For an excellent theory paper on the linguistic connection between walking together and conflict resolution, (e.g. “moving on”, “finding common ground”, being “at a stand-still”), see Webb et al., 2017 [40]). As a proof-of-concept we explored the potential of this simple context shift–walking together outside—to improve objective and subjective negotiation outcomes.

We selected a negotiation exercise between candidate and recruiter that had opportunities for both cooperative and competitive behavior. The only gender-specific improvements of walking were improved outcome equity (our proxy for power differential) and decreased negative emotions. Walking was associated with mutual liking independent of gender, while gender (men) was associated with more positive emotion and mutual trust (compared to women) independent of walking. These findings show more of a relational impact of condition than a work performance impact. We discuss the implications and limitations of these results below.

Implications

Negotiation is commonly associated with more negative feelings for women, but walking outside together led to less negative emotions for women. Additionally, unequal outcomes in negotiations can be perpetuated by stereotype threat of gender-based behaviors and priming of different power positions; walking outside together led to more outcome equity, therefore a more equal sharing of points. One explanation for both of these results could be that walking created a more cooperative milieu, as walking together is a synchronous activity [25, 26], and removed the negative impact of stereotypical environments (e.g. office board rooms). Having a novel environment and less negative emotions could have led to a more equitable more cooperative performance outcome.

Additionally, walking together provided an informal context. This stands in contrast to the competitiveness and power differences that are typically associated with negotiation performance, stereotypical male behavior, and the more formal contexts (e.g. seated in a boardroom, one person across a desk from the other) where they take place [1, 3, 4]. When traditional gender roles are primed, women show poorer performances [4]; but outside on a partnered walk, there are few, if any, cues to prime social roles or competitive, zero-sum behaviors.

That walking decreased the outcome equity in men, a higher level of power differences in the outcomes, was surprising. While exercise may increase testosterone in men more than women, theoretically priming more competitive behaviors [41, 42], walking is not at the level of intensity as aerobic exercise. One possibility is that walking together for women motivates a cooperative mindset but walking together for men feels more novel, or may create greater vigilance and more competitiveness. Future studies should not only include measures of perceived power and perceived competitiveness, but also include a measure of walking speed, which may be faster in more competitive negotiations.

The psychological impact of walking for women was perhaps the most important result. Women tend to have more negative feelings about negotiating than men [20, 24]. Our current study showed men felt more positive in both negotiation conditions. To the degree that negative emotions compete with cognitive resources needed for successful negotiations, walking together may provide a simple solution for women leveling the psychological playing field. Further, walking increased mutual liking between the parties for both men and women. As many negotiations in real life require future interactions, an outcome with less negative feelings and more mutual liking may be an important one, a future benefit not often considered or relevant in single-instance negotiation studies. Future studies should test multiple meeting negotiations to see if this increased rapport confers sustainable benefits.

Finally, it is worth noting that though walking did not affect the pair’s total points, it also did not hurt performance. From a public health perspective, finding ways to interrupt prolonged sitting with thoughtfully chosen walking meetings, without hurting performance, is important to decrease the negative health impacts of prolonged sedentary behavior [43, 44]. Researching different social interactions and meeting types that can be done while walking, without hurting performance, can thoughtfully motivate decisions for integrating activity into sedentary workdays which do not negatively affect worker productivity.

Limitations and future directions

The study had several limitations. First, this was a proof-of-concept study exploring the potential impact of a novel context variable (i.e. a walking meeting) on outcomes of interest. We did not do an a-priori statistical power analysis and we encourage readers to interpret our results as exploratory research. All findings should be taken as preliminary and offering inspiration for further, focused studies. Statistical power is a serious limitation for studies in this context due to high variances and low likely effect sizes [45]. As a power sensitivity analysis, based on the variances in total points we observed, for example, a study of this size (~ 40 pairs in each condition) would be powered to detect a difference by condition of approximately 1230 points (this is the minimum detectable effect). In particular, our preliminary finding that the impacts of walking on negotiation outcomes may differ by gender represents an interesting possible focal point for follow-up. If the effects of walking are indeed opposite for men and women, then statistical power may be better in single-gender studies than in studies (like this one) which consider both genders and try to estimate an overall effect.

Another limitation is our post-test-only assessment of emotions. Though randomization helps mitigate effects of any individual differences in mood, future research should have a pre-post design for a more rigorous test for the impact of walking on emotions from negotiations. A strength of post-only assessment is that it avoids priming (e.g. extra attention to their emotions) or cuing participants to study hypotheses.

The largely homogeneous graduate school of business student population make the outcomes less generalizeable; students may have brought stronger narratives to either recruiter or candidate roles having more exposure to job negotiation themes in their business classes. A more representative adult sample can test if results generalize to workforce populations or non-financial negotiations.

In contrast to some literature [3, 4] we found no significant difference in the total points by condition for men vs women pair negotiations. One reason for this could be that New Recruit had more cooperative task features, shown to moderate the gender differences [3, 4, 46]. A stronger test of whether walking can mitigate effects of harmful context-cues may be to induce a stereotype threat prior to the negotiation [4, 5, 9, 47, 48].

We did not dissociate the impact of walking from walking together. Future iterations of this work might also include a walking virtual (computer-mediated) meeting to isolate whether walking together in person confers differential benefits to walking in general. To isolate the cognitive effects of walking, a study could contrast single and multiple issues (working memory), or assess the number of divergent viewpoints discussed and resolved during the negotiation process (analogical thinking).

We also did not isolate the effects of being outdoors on the current outcomes. An ideal 2x2 future study could vary outdoors (inside board room vs outside board room) by movement (sitting vs walking). While there is substantial literature supporting the mood enhancing effects of being outdoors [49, 50], many of the cognitive effects of movement relevant to the current negotiation exercise is movement whether one is indoors or outdoors [11, 51]

It is possible that walking together was simply a novelty. Instead of the shared physical movement and path navigation focus driving the effects, the key feature may be being somewhere other than inside an office. Additional conditions of sitting side by side outside on a bench or inside at a coffee shop can dissociate the novel, non-traditional-business context from the walking together. To distinguish between synchronous and non-synchronous physical movement, playing golf is a feasible condition with real-world precedence as a context for work meetings.

The social and psychological findings from this study motivate researching the longer-term impact of walking together. Perhaps it does not improve immediate negotiation performance, but rather leads to better future negotiations and social rapport between the negotiators. Using measures where a second meeting for either the same or a different negotiation with the same partner is a logical next step.

Notably, this study is the first of its kind to test the effect of the simple contextual change of walking together to decrease historical differences in negotiation outcomes for men and women. Compared to sitting, walking while negotiating increased equality of outcomes and decreased negative emotions for women, but not for men. It also led to increased liking for both women and men. If walking together could help mitigate performance differences in negotiation, this is an easy step forward towards a more equal and shared footing in the workplace for men and women. Importantly, finding ways to integrate light movement into work, especially into emotionally charged situations, without decreasing performance can lead to healthier work cultures for all.

Data Availability

We have published the dataset and the Rmarkdown on figshare at the doi listed: 10.6084/m9.figshare.20645502.

Funding Statement

Grant 1K01HL13670201A1 from NIH NHLBI was awarded to MAO. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681.r001

Decision Letter 0

Ricky Siu Wong

11 Oct 2022

PONE-D-22-23834Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiatingPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Oppezzo,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear Dr. Oppezzo:

I write to you regarding manuscript # PONE-D-22-23834 entitled " Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating" which you submitted to Plos ONE.

The paper was reviewed by myself and two reviewers. Thank you for submitting your manuscript to our journal. The paper was reviewed by a very qualified team. They all come to the same conclusion. It looks like the paper would need to undergo a rather substantial revision and rewrite of major sections. While there is certainly no guarantee about a positive outcome of this new submission, we encourage you to consider doing so. We are therefore leaving it up to you of whether you would like to take this route, or rather move to a different journal. Reviewers are clear in their criticism, and I concur with their conclusion in my recommendation to the EIC. I hope you will find the feedback in this review process helpful. Please refer to the following points if you decide to revise the manuscript.

1. Both reviewers and I have identified that a detailed explanation as to why, exactly, walking would be more beneficial for women negotiators is missing. As pointed out by R1, why, specifically, should pairs of women (as compared to men) obtain more total points and have more equal outcome distributions when they are walking? It is important that you provide a detailed theoretical rationale that strengthens the current manuscript. The literature support for the hypothesis about liking and mutual trust is also not substantial enough.

2. Concerns about sample size: As for now, it is unclear as to whether the current study has sufficient power to reliably study, for instance, moderation involving participants’ gender.

3. Please explain why you did not predict moderation by gender for Hypotheses 4a and 4b. I believe that strengthening the theoretical aspects of gender in negotiation will help put your work in a better shape.

4. I suggest that you should consider either HLM or SEM (preferably in the context of the Actor-Partner Interaction Model; Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006) to analyse the data related to mutual liking, emotion, and mutual trust. This would allow both parties' data to be included in a single model that takes dependence (due to dyad) into account.

The reviewer reports are attached.

Sincerely,

Ricky Wong, PhD

Academic Editor, Plos ONE

Reviewer Comments to Author:

Reviewer: 1

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Partly

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Yes

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Yes

Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Yes

Thank you very much for offering me the opportunity to review your paper entitled “Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating.” There are many things to like about your paper: First of all, I was intrigued by the general idea of the manuscript to examine the influence of walking (vs. sitting) on people’s negotiation outcomes (both objective and subjective). Moreover, I greatly appreciate the attention paid to potentially differential effects for women and men. Thus, my sense is that the general topic is very interesting to both researchers and practitioners. Moreover, I found your paper easy to read and to be clear. That being said, however, I also have a number of more critical comments. Still, I hope that they are helpful as you are onto something really interesting.

1: Although I appreciate the theoretical rationales on why walking can help to support people negotiating (e.g., creativity and memory), what I was missing perhaps the most was a detailed explanation as to why, exactly, walking would be more beneficial for women negotiators. Why, specifically, should pairs of women (as compared to men) obtain more total points and have more equal outcome distributions when they are walking? As it stands, only very short shrift is given to these questions. Going forward, providing a detailed theoretical rationale would clearly help to strengthen the current manuscript.

2: Perhaps this is a matter of preference, but I would appreciate the hypotheses to be fully and clearly articulated (p. 7).

3: Why was there no moderation by gender expected for Hypotheses 4a and 4b? This idea seems to come out of nowhere, especially since there was a related moderation hypothesis for the preceding hypotheses. Once again, this issue highlights that more theoretical clarity regarding the hypotheses and their underlying rationales is needed (see my point no. 1).

4: In contrast, some information (e.g., on the sample) appeared twice. This provides an opportunity to shorten the paper to make room for greater elaboration on the theorizing.

5: Although I understand that recruiting many participants to take part in a real, interactive study (including walking) can be challenging, I am especially concerned about the current sample size. We know from past research that gender differences in negotiation typically are small or medium-sized (e.g., Kugler et al.’s meta-analysis on negotiation initiation from 2018). To detect small or medium effect sizes typically requires greater samples, especially when interactions are to be examined (see https://approachingblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/powering-your-interaction-2/). Thus, as there does not seem to be an a-priori power analysis, I would appreciate an inclusion of a power sensitivity analysis (see Giner-Sorolla et al.’s paper called “Power to detect what?”). As it stands, it is unclear to me whether the current study actually has sufficient power to reliably study, for instance, moderation involving participants’ gender.

6: Please provide complete tests statistics for the main regression and mixed model analyses, as well as for the follow-up tests that are meant to examine the differential effects of walking vs. sitting for women and men. As it stands, it is unclear to me whether the follow-up tests are significant as well, which would be particularly relevant information vis-à-vis the hypotheses.

Finally, thanks again for allowing me to review your paper. In my view, you are addressing a fascinating topic, so that I hope that my comments are not only critical but also helpful.

Reviewer: 2

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Yes

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

The manuscript “Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating” attempts to examines an interesting and promising topic. While I do believe that the manuscript and associated data can be used to make a substantive contribution, in my review, I noted several concerns and limitations, which I outline below:

1. Literature demonstrates that walking can enhance creativity and mood. This has been highlighted in both abstract and the theory part. However, why didn’t the authors measure creativity or moods as the potential mediator?

2. There is a lack of theory for studying gender as the moderator. The authors should provide substantial theoretical background for why gender can moderate the effect. As the abstract mentions, negotiation can exacerbate power differentials. However, what is the relationship between walking and power? The authors should provide more gender-related literature review that focuses on the effect of social conditioning to substantiate the theory part.

3. There is a lack of motivation for studying gender as the moderator. From abstract, introduction, and discussion sections, it is assumed that the authors want to solve the problem of long sitting at work. Then, why did the authors use the negotiation context? Negotiation context cannot cover all the other long sitting at work. The focus was then totally lost when abruptly mentioning gender. The authors should first identify the identities of the audience first. The gender scholars or the occupational health scholars? One paper better has one consistent story line. The authors should better incorporate walking as a contextualized condition for gender research.

4. There is a misalignment between the goal of the research and the methodology. “The present study’s goal was to investigate the potential for walking to improve performance on a type of work interaction.” This is too broad. The authors should narrow down their practical and theoretical focus and the literature review to only negotiation and gender. Or the authors can broaden their data to other work settings and other work performance variables. This also applies to the tones of abstract, introduction, discussion, and other overall statements that cover the purpose of the research.

5. If the research focuses on gender as the moderator, the authors must justify why they only used same-gender pairs, instead of mixed-gender pairs.

6. The hypotheses should be stated in an academic and professional way. The authors can learn from the published papers.

7. There is no literature or theoretical support for Hypothesis 2 about outcome equity. The literature support for the hypothesis about liking and mutual trust is also not substantial enough.

8. The authors should justify why they deleted the data of the participants who know their counterpart personally. In the real world, people usually know each other in the working setting.

9. The authors should describe the condition of the room where the participants sat and the details of the walking environment. For example, did the room have a table between the recruiter and the candidate to create more power differentiation (e.g., Curhan et al., 2008)? Was the walking loop in a garden or a hallway? And more importantly, the authors must validate that all the other conditions were equivalent across the experimental conditions. For example, did the participants sit in the same room and walk in the same room? If not, then what other details were different? This is because all the other conditions might influence the negotiation process, not only the walking per se. For example, the authors must rule out the possibility that the main effect came from the green plants or the sunshine, or others’ presence in the walking loop, instead of walking VS. sitting per se.

10. “New Recruit” task has another merit that the authors could have elaborated: it has power differentiation between the recruiter and the candidate. If the power is equal, the moderating effect of gender might not be salient. This brings about another issue: the authors should examine and report the individual outcome and controlled for the role in their statistical analyses. Also, the authors should further elaborate the task and process in the text, especially the integrative and distributive issues, rather than putting everything in the supplementary materials.

11. The paragraph under Sample Demographics in Results is repetitive of the second paragraph under Sample in Methods.

12. From the results and discussion, the effects of walking are not on “work performance” (as the authors claimed) or negotiation performance more specifically, but on the relational outcomes, such as emotions, mutual liking and trust. Thus, the authors might want to change the focus of the research to be relationship building in the negotiation context, instead of emphasizing “work performance.”

13. “One explanation could be that walking created a more cooperative milieu, as walking together is a synchronous activity. While in male-female pairs women cooperate more, in same gender pairs, women have been shown to cooperate less than male-male pairs (d=.16)41. Walking together may have mitigated this difference.” The present research did not use mixed-gender pairs, so it is questionable that authors claim walking mitigated “this difference.”

14. Although the authors mentioned about power distribution in other sessions for many times, the theoretical implications did not discuss the power differentiation perspective. The authors should elaborate more on this interpretation.

15. The increase of point distribution among men participants in the walking condition seems to be contradictory to the main interpretation of the other results. Does walking increase or decrease power distribution? The authors should provide sufficient theoretical interpretation to explain the seemingly contradictory results.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: No

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Thank you very much for offering me the opportunity to review your paper entitled “Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating.” There are many things to like about your paper: First of all, I was intrigued by the general idea of the manuscript to examine the influence of walking (vs. sitting) on people’s negotiation outcomes (both objective and subjective). Moreover, I greatly appreciate the attention paid to potentially differential effects for women and men. Thus, my sense is that the general topic is very interesting to both researchers and practitioners. Moreover, I found your paper easy to read and to be clear. That being said, however, I also have a number of more critical comments. Still, I hope that they are helpful as you are onto something really interesting.

2: Perhaps this is a matter of preference, but I would appreciate the hypotheses to be fully and clearly articulated (p. 7).

4: In contrast, some information (e.g., on the sample) appeared twice. This provides an opportunity to shorten the paper to make room for greater elaboration on the theorizing.

Finally, thanks again for allowing me to review your paper. In my view, you are addressing a fascinating topic, so that I hope that my comments are not only critical but also helpful.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript “Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating” attempts to examines an interesting and promising topic. While I do believe that the manuscript and associated data can be used to make a substantive contribution, in my review, I noted several concerns and limitations, which I outline below:

5. If the research focuses on gender as the moderator, the authors must justify why they only used same-gender pairs, instead of mixed-gender pairs.

6. The hypotheses should be stated in an academic and professional way. The authors can learn from the published papers.

7. There is no literature or theoretical support for Hypothesis 2 about outcome equity. The literature support for the hypothesis about liking and mutual trust is also not substantial enough.

8. The authors should justify why they deleted the data of the participants who know their counterpart personally. In the real world, people usually know each other in the working setting.

11. The paragraph under Sample Demographics in Results is repetitive of the second paragraph under Sample in Methods.

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PLoS One. 2023 Mar 17;18(3):e0282681. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681.r002

Author response to Decision Letter 0

6 Feb 2023

Response to Reviewers

We thank the editor and both reviewers for their thorough, helpful, and constructive review of our manuscript. We have addressed all of the suggestions, substantially reframed the paper, and believe the work is much stronger as a result of this peer review process. Please find our specific responses outlined below. Thank you again for the opportunity to learn from you and better our work.

General:

G1: Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well.

G1 Response: We have now added an ethics statement to the Methods section of our paper. The Stanford University Institutional Review Board approved this study, and all participants signed a consent form prior to participation.

Editor:

E_1. Both reviewers and I have identified that a detailed explanation as to why, exactly, walking would be more beneficial for women negotiators is missing. As pointed out by R1, why, specifically, should pairs of women (as compared to men) obtain more total points and have more equal outcome distributions when they are walking? It is important that you provide a detailed theoretical rationale that strengthens the current manuscript. The literature support for the hypothesis about liking and mutual trust is also not substantial enough.

E_1 Response: We thank the reviewers for this clear and unanimous suggestion. We have substantially reframed the paper and more clearly supported the gender hypotheses. We have added a concept map of our hypotheses to show how we hypothesize walking outside together may affect the outcomes. We recognize that the literature supporting why walking together outside would improve mutual liking and trust (our measure of rapport) is limited to the references we have provided (to our knowledge). We hope this work contributes to this space, and we thought it important to investigate relational measures such as mutual liking and mutual trust as they would be helpful for future research.

E_2. Concerns about sample size: As for now, it is unclear as to whether the current study has sufficient power to reliably study, for instance, moderation involving participants’ gender.

E_2 Response: Thank you for your suggestion. We now include the paragraph below in the limitations to clarify that statistical power is a concern and the results we find should be considered exploratory. We did not do an a-priori power analysis for the proof-of-concept study. We took a reviewer’s suggestion to do a power sensitivity analysis, which we now include in the limitation sections of the paper. One worry for being under-powered is the chance that an effect was there but we did not have enough of a sample size to detect it. We did not find an effect on total points, therefore we used this as the basis for our sensitivity analysis. Based on the variances in total points we observed, a study of this size (~ 40 pairs in each condition) would be 80% powered to detect a difference by condition of approximately 1230 points (this is the minimum detectable effect).

“The study had several limitations. First, this was a proof-of-concept study exploring the potential impact of a novel context variable (i.e. a walking meeting) on outcomes of interest. We did not do an a-priori statistical power analysis and we encourage readers to interpret our results as exploratory research. All findings should be taken as preliminary and offering inspiration for further, focused studies. Statistical power is a serious limitation for studies in this context due to high variances and low likely effect sizes45. As a power sensitivity analysis, based on the variances in total points we observed, for example, a study of this size (~ 40 pairs in each condition) would be powered to detect a difference by condition of approximately 1230 points (this is the minimum detectable effect). In particular, our preliminary finding that the impacts of walking on negotiation outcomes may differ by gender represents an interesting possible focal point for follow-up. If the effects of walking are indeed opposite for men and women, then statistical power may be better in single-gender studies than in studies (like this one) which consider both genders and try to estimate an overall effect.”

Just for contrast, (not for the text), we also calculated how many participants we would have needed to recruit if the effect size we did find in the total points were big enough for us to consider meaningful. To achieve 80% power for the primary condition comparison of sitting vs walking on total pair points in the negotiation, based on the current effect sizes in total points we found, we would need to run 892 pairs. To achieve 80% for the primary condition comparison of men x women on total pair points in the negotiation, based on the current effect sizes, we would need to run 470 pairs. Finally, for the interaction of condition x gender, the current study found an F statistic of .003. This would require an even larger sample to detect this level of an effect.

E_3. Please explain why you did not predict moderation by gender for Hypotheses 4a and 4b. I believe that strengthening the theoretical aspects of gender in negotiation will help put your work in a better shape.

E_3 Response: Thank you for raising this concern. With the increased theoretical clarity and framing suggesting possible ways in which walking outside together can affect our outcomes by removing stereotypically threatening cues and contexts, we have now included the gender interaction in all of the hypotheses.

E_4. I suggest that you should consider either HLM or SEM (preferably in the context of the Actor-Partner Interaction Model; Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006) to analyse the data related to mutual liking, emotion, and mutual trust. This would allow both parties' data to be included in a single model that takes dependence (due to dyad) into account.

E_4 Response: Thank you for the great reference. We now cite Kenny, Kashy, and Cook as our inspiration for using the linear mixed model approach of hierarchical linear modeling for the individual variables of emotion. We explain why we included pair as a random intercept for emotion. We also explain further why for the pair-level variable (mutual liking, mutual trust) analyses we did not use pair as a random intercept. Instead, we chose to look at the pair as a unit rather than two individuals within a pair, and took the average of liking and trust to reflect mutual liking and mutual trust of the pair.

SEM would be a great idea! We chose to not use that analyses here because of concerns our proof-of-concept design was not robust enough to handle the pair-wise correlations involved. Now that we have detected signal in some of the outcomes but not others, a fully-powered hypothesis-confirmatory trial can be run to test for replication and mechanism.

Reviewer 1:

R1: Thank you very much for offering me the opportunity to review your paper entitled “Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating.” There are many things to like about your paper: First of all, I was intrigued by the general idea of the manuscript to examine the influence of walking (vs. sitting) on people’s negotiation outcomes (both objective and subjective). Moreover, I greatly appreciate the attention paid to potentially differential effects for women and men. Thus, my sense is that the general topic is very interesting to both researchers and practitioners. Moreover, I found your paper easy to read and to be clear. That being said, however, I also have a number of more critical comments. Still, I hope that they are helpful as you are onto something really interesting.

R1 Response: Thank you so much for your positive words and interest, as well as your very helpful edits and comments. We have substantially revised the manuscript with your review, and hope you find the new version responsive and improved.

R1_1: Although I appreciate the theoretical rationales on why walking can help to support people negotiating (e.g., creativity and memory), what I was missing perhaps the most was a detailed explanation as to why, exactly, walking would be more beneficial for women negotiators. Why, specifically, should pairs of women (as compared to men) obtain more total points and have more equal outcome distributions when they are walking? As it stands, only very short shrift is given to these questions. Going forward, providing a detailed theoretical rationale would clearly help to strengthen the current manuscript.

R1_1 Response: We have substantially reframed the paper to be clearer about why and how walking together may improve objective and subjective negotiation outcomes for everyone. We also have added more detail explaining both why and how this may particularly help women, leading with a section describing the gender gap in negotiations sensitive to contextual shifts (such as removing cues to power differentials or having multiple issues rather than a single outcome). We hypothesize that walking together outside will benefit women more because they start out disadvantaged stereotypically compared to men.

We also have created and included a hypotheses concept map (now Figure 1) to help provide an overview of how we think walking together outside will affect the outcomes.

R1_2: Perhaps this is a matter of preference, but I would appreciate the hypotheses to be fully and clearly articulated (p. 7).

R1_2 Response: Thank you, we have edited the hypotheses to be more clearly articulated. As the hypotheses all shared the same stem prediction, to avoid repetition, we wrote the common stem prediction (i.e. “compared to negotiating sitting together inside, negotiating when walking together when outside would lead to improvement in:”), and then numbered the hypotheses after each outcome. We then described the moderation hypotheses at the end: “For each outcome, this effect of walking compared to sitting will be greater for women pairs than men pairs.”

We can also articulate each hypothesis separately for each measure, repeating the stem prediction, if this would be even more helpful, and not too redundant. Example below:

H1: We hypothesized that compared to negotiating sitting together inside, negotiating when walking together when outside would lead to improvement in the objective negotiation outcome of total points, and that this improvement would be greater for women pairs than men pairs.

H2: We hypothesized that compared to negotiating sitting together inside, negotiating when walking together when outside would lead to improvement in the objective negotiation outcome of outcome equity, and that this improvement would be greater for women pairs than men pairs.

…

R1_3: Why was there no moderation by gender expected for Hypotheses 4a and 4b? This idea seems to come out of nowhere, especially since there was a related moderation hypothesis for the preceding hypotheses. Once again, this issue highlights that more theoretical clarity regarding the hypotheses and their underlying rationales is needed (see my point no. 1).

R1_3 Response: With our new reframing, organization of the literature, and conceptual hypotheses map, we had outlined how the effect of walking together may improve rapport of mutual liking and trust. For continuity of analyses, we now include gender moderation as hypotheses on every outcome.

R1_4: In contrast, some information (e.g., on the sample) appeared twice. This provides an opportunity to shorten the paper to make room for greater elaboration on the theorizing.

R1_4 Response: Thank you, we have removed the replicated paragraph.

R1_5: Although I understand that recruiting many participants to take part in a real, interactive study (including walking) can be challenging, I am especially concerned about the current sample size. We know from past research that gender differences in negotiation typically are small or medium-sized (e.g., Kugler et al.’s meta-analysis on negotiation initiation from 2018). To detect small or medium effect sizes typically requires greater samples, especially when interactions are to be examined (see https://approachingblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/powering-your-interaction-2/). Thus, as there does not seem to be an a-priori power analysis, I would appreciate an inclusion of a power sensitivity analysis (see Giner-Sorolla et al.’s paper called “Power to detect what?”). As it stands, it is unclear to me whether the current study actually has sufficient power to reliably study, for instance, moderation involving participants’ gender.

R1_5 Response: The paper by Giner-Sorolla and the post on power were both great references, we thank the reviewer for these. Thank you for suggesting the power sensitivity analysis. That we did not do an a-priori power analysis – and the risk of being underpowered- is an important limitation of our study. One worry for being under-powered is the chance that an effect was there but we did not have enough of a sample size to detect it. Therefore, in the limitation section, we address this, run a sensitivity analysis, and cite the Giner-Sorolla paper as inspiration.

We did not find an effect on total points, therefore we used this as the basis for our sensitivity analysis. Based on the variances in total points we observed, a study of this size (~ 40 pairs in each condition) would be 80% powered to detect a difference by condition of approximately 1230 points (this is the minimum detectable effect).

We now include this important point in the limitations of our paper as well, to clarify that statistical power is a concern and the results must be considered exploratory and preliminary – an interesting possible focal point for future studies.

R1_6: Please provide complete tests statistics for the main regression and mixed model analyses, as well as for the follow-up tests that are meant to examine the differential effects of walking vs. sitting for women and men. As it stands, it is unclear to me whether the follow-up tests are significant as well, which would be particularly relevant information vis-à-vis the hypotheses.

R1_6 Response: Thank you, we now include all of the non-significant test values as well.

R1_7: Finally, thanks again for allowing me to review your paper. In my view, you are addressing a fascinating topic, so that I hope that my comments are not only critical but also helpful.

R1_7 Response. We greatly appreciate your comments and feel the manuscript is stronger because of responding to them.

Reviewer: 2

R2: The manuscript “Weaving activity into work: Walking while negotiating” attempts to examines an interesting and promising topic. While I do believe that the manuscript and associated data can be used to make a substantive contribution, in my review, I noted several concerns and limitations, which I outline below:

R2 Response: Thank you for your review and suggestions. We hope to have addressed them and believe our paper is stronger as a result of responding to your comments and thoughts.

R2_1. Literature demonstrates that walking can enhance creativity and mood. This has been highlighted in both abstract and the theory part. However, why didn’t the authors measure creativity or moods as the potential mediator?

R2_1 Response: This is a great idea. We did not have a direct measure of creative thinking in the negotiation, but we instead hypothesized that walking would help negotiation because optimal negotiations use analogical thinking (finding commonalities across disparate ideas, rather than only entertaining a single solution). The benefit then should have been seen in total pair points. An idea for a process measure to capture the cognitive benefits of negotiation while walking would be to code the actual negotiation for number of times pairs identified common ground across disparate views. We now add this to the future directions portion of the paper.

We did measure negative and positive emotions as a proxy for mood. It is a great suggestion to test mediators; we did not run a mediational analysis for this study. A follow-up, fully-powered study to measure and test mechanism would be an optimal place to use SEM analyses, and we hope this to be done in the future.

R2_2. There is a lack of theory for studying gender as the moderator. The authors should provide substantial theoretical background for why gender can moderate the effect. As the abstract mentions, negotiation can exacerbate power differentials. However, what is the relationship between walking and power? The authors should provide more gender-related literature review that focuses on the effect of social conditioning to substantiate the theory part.

R2_2 Response: Thank you for the encouragement to organize our paper with more theoretical background and motivation. We have substantially reframed the paper and now lead with a section addressing the literature showing contextually-sensitive gender gaps in negotiation outcomes. We note this now in the paper that while we do believe walking together will improve negotiation outcomes for everyone, because we believe it will remove barriers that commonly impair women’s performance, we explore the moderation of gender. We also now include a conceptual map (Figure 1) to suggest potential connections between the condition of walking outside and our outcome measures.

R2_3. There is a lack of motivation for studying gender as the moderator. From abstract, introduction, and discussion sections, it is assumed that the authors want to solve the problem of long sitting at work. Then, why did the authors use the negotiation context? Negotiation context cannot cover all the other long sitting at work. The focus was then totally lost when abruptly mentioning gender. The authors should first identify the identities of the audience first. The gender scholars or the occupational health scholars? One paper better has one consistent story line. The authors should better incorporate walking as a contextualized condition for gender research.

R2_3 Response: This is a great point, and in response we have substantially reframed our paper to be more in line with our theoretical points, our motivation, and our hypothesized effects of walking together outside on these outcomes. We hope that our new framing addresses your valid point and situates the work for the proper audience. This work was a uniquely interdisciplinary project and study, with study investigators from business, health and medicine, education, statistics, and psychology all united by the first author and passion for this topic to be addressed; therefore, each of us learned different important things for our disciplines. However, we agree with you that the paper should instead be framed more for the audience studying the contextual effects of negotiation and gender, and hope that our new framing situates the work properly.

R2_4. There is a misalignment between the goal of the research and the methodology. “The present study’s goal was to investigate the potential for walking to improve performance on a type of work interaction.” This is too broad. The authors should narrow down their practical and theoretical focus and the literature review to only negotiation and gender. Or the authors can broaden their data to other work settings and other work performance variables. This also applies to the tones of abstract, introduction, discussion, and other overall statements that cover the purpose of the research.

R2_4 Response: We have substantially reframed the paper, rewritten the introduction and literature review, and reframed our overall purpose. Thank you very much for your suggestion to align our study goals with our audience and study design. While we had a highly interdisciplinary team, this study should target a more specific audience and purpose. We hope the edits now address this.

R2_5. If the research focuses on gender as the moderator, the authors must justify why they only used same-gender pairs, instead of mixed-gender pairs.

R2_5 Response: This is a great point. Given resource constraints for this preliminary study, we realized that we would have to prioritize among competing goals. On the one hand, a desire for completeness would have led us to a more complex design in which we had M-M pairs, F-F pairs, and M-F pairs. On the other hand, our main research question was whether there were gender differences in the effects of walking in nature (versus sitting inside) on negotiation-related outcomes and affect. As noted by the Editor (point E-2), given available resources, there was already a concern about power, and we decided that for this initial study, it would be wisest to keep the design as simple as we could (and thus include only M-M and F-F pairs), particularly in light of evidence that women may negotiate differently with men than with women, and may prioritize being liked to different degrees (Babcock and Laschever, 2003). Our decision to maintain a focused design meant that we maximized our power to detect predicted effects, and left for the future a more complete design. We see the present study as a first step in isolating what a simple shift in context could do for negative feelings and stereotype threat for women in the negotiation context. An important next study could use mixed gender pairs vs same gender as a condition variable; here, one would also have to look at the interaction of role x gender. We now include a reference justifying why we chose same-gender pairs:

Same gender pairs were employed to distill the effects of men and women negotiation from the effects of mixed-gender pairs21

R2_6. The hypotheses should be stated in an academic and professional way. The authors can learn from the published papers.

R2_6 Response: Thank you, we have edited the hypotheses to be more clearly articulated. As the hypotheses all shared the same stem prediction, to avoid repetition, we wrote the common stem prediction (i.e. “compared to negotiating sitting together inside, negotiating when walking together when outside would lead to improvement in:”), and then numbered the hypotheses after each outcome. We then described the moderation hypotheses at the end: “For each outcome, this effect of walking compared to sitting will be greater for women pairs than men pairs.”

We can also articulate each hypothesis separately for each measure, repeating the stem prediction, if this would be even more helpful, and not too redundant. Example below:

…

R2_7. There is no literature or theoretical support for Hypothesis 2 about outcome equity. The literature support for the hypothesis about liking and mutual trust is also not substantial enough.

R2_7 Response: We have added to the measures section to explain outcome equity as our proxy for power differential. We have also included in the introduction and on the new Figure 1 hypothesis concept map how we believe walking outside together will influence outcome equity. We added more references on behavioral synchrony and cooperation to further theoretically support how walking together may improve rapport (which we measure by mutual liking and mutual trust), but we also acknowledge there is a paucity of work in this particular area. We hope this study adds to the work!

R2_8. The authors should justify why they deleted the data of the participants who know their counterpart personally. In the real world, people usually know each other in the working setting.

R2_8 Response: This is a good point. We include now a statement as to why we removed those who knew each other previously, as we didn’t randomize based on this and we wanted to isolate the effects of walking together on relational outcomes independent of knowing each other.

“excluded due to… knowing their counterpart personally. The latter was a reason for exclusion because we did not a priori assess or randomize participants based on knowing each other, which would influence the relational outcomes of mutual liking and mutual trust. We also wanted to isolate the effects of walking independent of prior relationship (and did not have a pre-test measure to assess change).”

R2_9. The authors should describe the condition of the room where the participants sat and the details of the walking environment. For example, did the room have a table between the recruiter and the candidate to create more power differentiation (e.g., Curhan et al., 2008)? Was the walking loop in a garden or a hallway? And more importantly, the authors must validate that all the other conditions were equivalent across the experimental conditions. For example, did the participants sit in the same room and walk in the same room? If not, then what other details were different? This is because all the other conditions might influence the negotiation process, not only the walking per se. For example, the authors must rule out the possibility that the main effect came from the green plants or the sunshine, or others’ presence in the walking loop, instead of walking VS. sitting per se.

R2_9 Response: This is a great point, we have added detail to the contexts in the methods section.

“Sitting condition participants sat across from each other, face-to-face in a room, with a table in between them. All sitting conditions were run in the same room. Walking condition participants were given a map of a 15-minute walking loop outside to follow. The loop was on the university campus which is a mix of trees, university buildings, alternate walking paths, and people. Variations in busy-ness, sunshine, and temperature occurred in the outdoor walking condition.”

We did not isolate the effect of outdoors (green environments and sunshine) from walking together, nor did we isolate the effect of walking from walking together. We have also added a section noting these limitations in the discussion section.

“We also did not isolate the effects of being outdoors on the current outcomes. An ideal 2x2 future study could vary outdoors (inside board room vs outside board room) by movement (sitting vs walking). While there is substantial literature supporting the mood enhancing effects of being outdoors, many of the cognitive effects of movement relevant to the current negotiation exercise is movement whether one is indoors or outdoors.”

R2_10. “New Recruit” task has another merit that the authors could have elaborated: it has power differentiation between the recruiter and the candidate. If the power is equal, the moderating effect of gender might not be salient. This brings about another issue: the authors should examine and report the individual outcome and controlled for the role in their statistical analyses. Also, the authors should further elaborate the task and process in the text, especially the integrative and distributive issues, rather than putting everything in the supplementary materials.

This is a valid point about the uniqueness of this measure. Rather than comparing individual points of recruiter to candidate in a mixed methods analysis, we chose to look at outcome equity as a proxy for the difference between the points earned. Individual points are necessarily tied to the partner’s points, therefore evaluating one person’s higher points and the other person’s necessarily lower points would in a way be double counting the effect for the pair. Therefore, we chose to use pair level outcomes for the negotiation total points and point differential. Here is the analysis on individual points however. Using a linear mixed effects model to compare the individual points for those who walked vs those who sat, we found no main effect of condition (p=.71), gender (p=.65), nor did we find a significant interaction of condition by gender (p=.97).

The idea of running recruiter x candidate analysis is excellent – we did run it, but also know we do not have enough individuals in each cell to reliably run the full factorial. Additionally, the three-way interaction is difficult to interpret. We have included the graph in the word document, formatted response to reviewers. Walking appeared to slightly decrease men recruiters, but boost men candidates. Walking appeared to boost women recruiters, but slightly decrease women candidates. This interaction is hard to derive from the literature, and with already concerns of being underpowered, we chose not to include it. One possibility is male recruiters typically hold the power positions when seated face to face, and when the dynamic was changed to walking they worked more cooperatively. Women recruiters, on the other hand, may typically fear backlash from asserting positions of power in the stereotypical context; therefore walking outside may have led them to lean into the position more.

We have added more detail about the measure into the measure section.

“Parties must agree on eight issues: two “fixed-sum” issues where parties’ pay out are mutually opposing (one party’s gain comes at the other’s loss); two congruent issues, or “value sharing” issues where parties’ interests are aligned (both parties want the same thing); and four integrative, or “value-creating” issues where parties can make trade-offs to create value and earn more points through pairing issues with asymmetric payouts.”

R2_11. The paragraph under Sample Demographics in Results is repetitive of the second paragraph under Sample in Methods.

R2_11 Response: We have removed the duplication, thank you for noting this.

R2_12. From the results and discussion, the effects of walking are not on “work performance” (as the authors claimed) or negotiation performance more specifically, but on the relational outcomes, such as emotions, mutual liking and trust. Thus, the authors might want to change the focus of the research to be relationship building in the negotiation context, instead of emphasizing “work performance.”

R2_12 Response: This is a great point, we did not find an effect on total points, which was a feature that indicates overall performance on the task. We removed statement of this being effective on work performance (which was also too general a term to be accurate given our measure was only on negotiation). We do believe that outcome equity is an important performance measure of negotiation, as it results in the joint gains of both parties within the negotiation. We appreciate that the main findings are overall subjective – and relational, as you suggest. We added a sentence to address this observation in the discussion.

“These findings show more of a relational impact of condition than a work performance impact.”

R2_13. “One explanation could be that walking created a more cooperative milieu, as walking together is a synchronous activity. While in male-female pairs women cooperate more, in same gender pairs, women have been shown to cooperate less than male-male pairs (d=.16)41. Walking together may have mitigated this difference.” The present research did not use mixed-gender pairs, so it is questionable that authors claim walking mitigated “this difference.”

R2_13 Response: We removed this reference to the mixed gender pairs. We also add more of the literature on how walking together induces synchrony and cooperation in the introduction.

R2_14. Although the authors mentioned about power distribution in other sessions for many times, the theoretical implications did not discuss the power differentiation perspective. The authors should elaborate more on this interpretation.

R2_14 Response. We now have connected the theoretical way in which walking together outside could reduce stereotype threat with the outcome measure of outcome equity (our measure of power differential, as a smaller difference between the two parties indicates more cooperation and mutual win, rather than single party winning the lion share of the points). We hope both the introduction and the addition of Figure 1 makes this clearer.

R2_15. The increase of point distribution among men participants in the walking condition seems to be contradictory to the main interpretation of the other results. Does walking increase or decrease power distribution? The authors should provide sufficient theoretical interpretation to explain the seemingly contradictory results.

R2_15 Response: This was puzzling and not predicted by our hypothesis or purported theoretical mechanisms or review of the literature. We now include a candidate explanation in the discussion, but agree there is no theoretical basis for this contradiction in results.

“That walking decreased the outcome equity in men, a higher level of power differences in the outcomes, was surprising. While exercise may increase testosterone in men more than women, theoretically priming more competitive behaviors41,42, walking is not at the level of intensity as aerobic exercise. One possibility is that walking together for women motivates a cooperative mindset but walking together for men feels more novel, or may create greater vigilance and more competitiveness. Future studies should not only include measures of perceived power and perceived competitiveness, but also include a measure of walking speed, which may be faster in more competitive negotiations.”

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PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681.r003

Decision Letter 1

Ricky Siu Wong

17 Feb 2023

PONE-D-22-23834R1Moving Outside the Board Room: A Proof-of-Concept Study on the Impact of Walking while NegotiatingPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Oppezzo,

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 03 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ricky Siu Wong, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

We feel that it has merit and we feel that you have taken the comments given by the reviewers and myself very seriously. Well done. However, this is a very minor issue relating to how you cite references in the main text. Please use [1]. [2], etc instead of superscripts. Once you have rectified this, I am happy to make a decision without sending out your paper for review again.

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PLoS One. 2023 Mar 17;18(3):e0282681. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681.r004

Author response to Decision Letter 1

17 Feb 2023

I have changed the citations to all be [1] formatted.

Thank you so much for you consideration and I am pleased that you and reviewers like the new version (so much stronger thanks to your helpful comments!)

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PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681.r005

Decision Letter 2

Ricky Siu Wong

21 Feb 2023

Moving Outside the Board Room: A Proof-of-Concept Study on the Impact of Walking while Negotiating

PONE-D-22-23834R2

Dear Dr. Oppezzo,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Ricky Wong, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

PLoS One. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282681.r006

Acceptance letter

Ricky Siu Wong

10 Mar 2023

PONE-D-22-23834R2

Moving Outside the Board Room: A Proof-of-Concept Study on the Impact of Walking while Negotiating

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Associated Data

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Supplementary Materials

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Data Availability Statement

We have published the dataset and the Rmarkdown on figshare at the doi listed: 10.6084/m9.figshare.20645502.

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PERMALINK

Moving outside the board room: A proof-of-concept study on the impact of walking while negotiating

Marily Oppezzo

Margaret A Neale

James J Gross

Judith J Prochaska

Daniel L Schwartz

Rachael C Aikens

Latha Palaniappan

Roles

Abstract

Purpose

Design

Participants

Intervention

Measures

Results

Conclusion

Purpose

Gender and negotiation

Fig 1. Hypotheses concept map.

Cognitive negotiation benefits of walking

Affective negotiation benefits of walking

The present study

Methods

Design and hypotheses

Ethics statement

Sample

Intervention

Procedure

Negotiation task

Measures

Objective negotiation outcomes

Subjective negotiation outcomes

Data analysis plan

Results

Sample demographics

Objective negotiation outcomes

Total points (Hypotheses 1)

Outcome equity (Pair, hypothesis 2)

Fig 2. Outcome Equity x Condition x Gender.

Subjective negotiation outcomes

Negative emotions (Hypothesis 3a)

Fig 3. Negative Emotions x Condition x Gender.

Positive emotions (Hypothesis 3b)

Fig 4. Positive Emotions x Condition x Gender.

Mutual liking (Hypothesis 4a)

Fig 5.

Mutual trust (Hypothesis 4b)

Discussion

Implications

Limitations and future directions

Data Availability

Funding Statement

References

Decision Letter 0

Ricky Siu Wong

Roles

Author response to Decision Letter 0

Decision Letter 1

Ricky Siu Wong

Roles

Author response to Decision Letter 1

Decision Letter 2

Ricky Siu Wong

Roles

Acceptance letter

Ricky Siu Wong

Roles

Associated Data

Supplementary Materials

Data Availability Statement

ACTIONS

PERMALINK

RESOURCES

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