How Salary Comparisons Among Spouses and Social Norms Affect the Salary Negotiations of R&D Workers

R&D workers are of strategic importance for firms because they accumulate tacit knowledge about their employers' technologies. They have substantial bargaining power about their salaries because this knowledge would be attractive for competitors but hard to replace by their existing employers. While these conditions are well understood, we know comparatively little about when R&D workers are motivated to negotiate aggressively for higher salaries. We draw on theoretical mechanisms from social comparisons within marriages in social psychology and reason that R&D workers who earn less than their spouses will negotiate higher salary increases. Further, we propose that social norms make this effect stronger for male R&D workers who are traditionally considered as the breadwinners in households as well as for R&D workers who have a relatively higher-ranked job than their spouses which makes them sensitive to seeing their status threatened. We test and support these hypotheses for 70,312 married R&D workers in 3,710 unique firms in Denmark between 2008 and 2016.