A strong offer from another company gives a job seeker negotiating power. For someone from a working-class background, it can also provide something more personal: proof that the market recognizes their value.

New research from Foster School Associate Professor of Management Elijah Wee finds that job seekers from less privileged backgrounds tend to enter salary negotiations with lower expectations than more privileged peers. With a strong outside offer in hand, that gap effectively disappears.

“It’s not just the money,” Wee says. “It’s the validation. It’s the social proof that you are worthy.”

The paper, “Leveling the Playing Field: Social Class Origin Influences the Impact of a Strong BATNA on Deservingness and Negotiation First Offer,” has been accepted by Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. BATNA is short for “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” Here, it means a strong offer from another employer that gives a job seeker leverage in salary negotiations.

The paper’s co-author is Shawn Xiaoshi Quan, who earned her PhD at Foster and is now an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico. When Quan was a doctoral student, she approached Wee about collaborating because she recognized their shared interest in how people from marginalized backgrounds navigate disadvantages at work.

Finding agency in unequal systems

The question of how people with less power or status navigate unequal systems has shaped Wee’s research for years.

“I’ve always been fascinated with underdogs,” he says.

His interest took shape in part during his time in the Singapore military, where he watched people in a highly hierarchical organization find careful, sophisticated ways to share ideas and push for change without provoking backlash.

More recently, his work has focused on people with marginalized or stigmatized identities, including workers with disabilities and people in stigmatized occupations. He is especially interested in agency: what people can do within those constraints and how managers, mentors, and allies can help.

“How do you play with the hand that you’re given?” Wee says. “You could say, ‘These are bad cards,’ but I need to find a way, or at least try to move the needle a little further.”

Salary negotiation offered Wee and Quan a revealing place to explore that idea. Salary is not just about money, Wee says. It reflects how much an organization values someone’s contribution and, in turn, what that individual believes they are worth.

The researchers focused on what negotiation scholars call the first offer: the opening salary figure the job seeker plans to bring to the table. That number can anchor the negotiation and shape the offers that follow.

In the first study, the participants were 361 recent engineering graduates seeking full-time employment. Because they were early in their careers, an initial salary difference could be particularly consequential.

“Imagine if you’re starting off with a five- or eight-thousand-dollar difference,” Wee says. “That will compound over time.”

Negotiation research has long treated a strong alternative offer as a broadly useful source of leverage. Wee and Quan wondered whether people from different class backgrounds might interpret it differently.

When leverage becomes validation

Without a strong outside offer, job seekers from lower-class backgrounds set substantially lower salary targets than those from higher-class backgrounds. When both groups held strong alternatives, there was no statistically significant difference in what they planned to request.

“The gap disappearing was most surprising to me,” Wee says.

The researchers identified one possible reason as deservingness: the belief that a favorable outcome is justified by someone’s effort, abilities, and contributions.

But they needed to rule out another explanation: Was the outside offer powerful simply because it gave job seekers useful salary information?

A second study involving 382 banking employees was designed to tease those possibilities apart. Participants reported how much they planned to request in salary and rated statements measuring their sense of deservingness, including whether they felt they had worked hard enough to deserve a good salary.

Everyone received information about the average salary for the position. One group was told they personally held a strong offer from another company.

Another group was told that a colleague with a similar background had received the high offer. A third group was given only the average salary information.

For participants from lower-class backgrounds, neither the salary benchmark nor the colleague’s offer produced the same increase in deservingness or planned salary request.

“It’s not an information story,” Wee says. “It’s about: Is it personal? Is something out there external that is validating my worth?”

That distinction adds an important layer to the pay-transparency conversation. Publishing salary ranges can reduce the information imbalance between employers and applicants. But knowing what a job pays does not mean every candidate feels equally justified asking for it. Someone may see the top of a salary range and still believe it applies to someone else.

Both studies took place in Singapore. Wee cautions that social class may be expressed differently across countries and labor markets, but he expects the underlying psychology of deservingness to extend beyond Singapore.

How mentors, employers, and coaches can help

For job seekers, the research suggests that awareness is an important first step. Social class can continue shaping expectations even after people earn the same education, experience, and credentials as their peers. Wee says mentors, career coaches, and trusted advisers can help candidates connect their abilities and accomplishments to an ambitious but defensible salary request.

Employers, recruiters, and career coaches can help by connecting information directly to the individual. Instead of presenting only a broad salary range, they can explain how a candidate’s skills, experience, and expected contributions relate to a particular point within it.

Wee also cautions employers against treating salary negotiation as a contest to secure talent for the lowest possible price. A company may save a few thousand dollars in the moment but leave a new employee feeling undervalued before the work has begun.

That responsibility does not end once the negotiation is over. For Wee, the research is part of a much larger conversation about how leaders recognize unequal starting points and use their influence to create opportunities for others.

Using power to open doors

Wee brings those questions into classrooms across Foster, from undergraduate management courses to MBA electives on power, status, and leadership, as well as executive education for experienced leaders.

Many students initially resist the idea of seeking power because they associate it with manipulation, office politics, or personal ambition.

Wee asks them to reframe it.

“In order for you to make meaningful impact, not just for you but for your team, you need to understand how politics are played out in the workplace,” he says.

An employee may have an excellent idea, for example, but still need champions, relationships, and credibility to get it heard. Understanding power and status can help people advance their own careers, but Wee is equally interested in how they use those resources on behalf of others.
“How do you use these two social currencies to open doors for others?” he asks.

Social class is central to those discussions because it is often invisible. Colleagues may not know what resources someone had growing up, which schools they attended, or what risks shaped their early choices. Yet those experiences can influence how comfortable people feel challenging a decision, requesting an opportunity, breaking an unwritten rule, or negotiating a salary.

Wee also asks students to recognize that the ability to challenge workplace norms can itself signal privilege. Some employees are thinking about how to push organizational boundaries. Others may not feel safe enough to speak.

Meaningful change requires people with influence to recognize barriers, listen to experiences different from their own, and use their positions to change policies and practices.

Those conversations can be especially consequential among Wee’s MBA and executive education students, many of whom already lead teams or influence hiring, compensation, and workplace culture. Their own workplace experiences also give the class real examples of what change looks like in practice.

Wee wants students to understand that power and status are not inherently good or bad. What matters is how they are used

“Can we make a meaningful impact in the workplace?” Wee asks. “How do I advocate for someone?”

Elijah Wee is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.