On the employee side, you can certainly say that being good at negotiating is a critical skill. But from the standpoint of an employer looking to distribute rai

On the employee side, you can certainly say that being good at negotiating is a critical skill. But from the standpoint of an employer looking to distribute raises is the most efficient manner, you don't want to promote someone simply for being a better negotiator or being better at marketing their work, unless negotiating/marketing is a part of their job. Assuming your goal is to pay people in proportion to their contributions, you want your salary-negotiation process to reflect actual contributions as much as possible, rather than reflecting people's ability to play up their contributions. You could compare it to the incentives for an ideal standardized test. For a test taker, the incentive is to study for the test as much as possible to get the highest score. But for test maker interested in measuring actual intelligence, ideally you want to design a test whose scores are relatively insensitive to time spent studying/memorizing, at least after a certain point. Obviously, you're never going to reach the ideal, but getting closer to it is still helpful. Also, "aggressive negotiation" (the phrase used in the article) is not necessarily the same as effective negotiation, so saying that you don't want to reward aggressive negotiation is not necessarily saying that the goal is to remove all negotiation from the equation.