Favouritism still an issue in the workplace
Managers agree that favouritism is a big factor in deciding who gets promoted although not many will admit to being biased in any way.
A survey by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and research firm Penn Schoen Berland, found 84% of business leaders admitting to favouritism at their workplace. However, only 23% acknowledged practicing it themselves. A mere nine percent said it was a determining factor in their last promotion.
This figure of nine percent was higher than what the author of the study had expected. "No one at this level of executive was going to admit it blatantly," Jonathan Gardner said.
Although three-quarters of survey respondents said that there are procedures in place to ensure fairness in the workplace, there are other subjective criteria such as whether the candidate “fits” into the corporate culture which make the lack of prejudice highly questionable.
Productivity and morale can suffer because of favouritism. "They're now playing office politics instead of focusing on organisational objectives," Lamar Reinsch, a management professor at McDonough and Gardner’s advisor on the paper, was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal.
We would like to read more such articles.This one is good but need to be more in detail.
ReplyDeleteThis article at some level may be true, however I believe and feel that many leaders and Managers are more careful when it comes to their favourites as they do not want to create perceptions of them playing favourites. Also managers tend to be more strict when it comes to their favourites as they would want their level of work to be excellent since they would like to showcase these favourites as their Protégé. Also the favourite employees are employees who are good performers and there is absolutely nothing wrong in treating a good performer differently. In fact HR should play a role in communicating to the employees about such aspects. However, everything said and done, there are exceptions to everything and there maybe managers that are biased for other reasons than performance
ReplyDeleteIt cannot be denied that Favouritism at the work place does exist however objective the system is built to avoid it. Corporate executives in higher places exercise arbitrary decisions when it comes to people decisions more to influence desired behaviors, enhance following and contribute to the security and stability of the respective Managers. Favouritism is largely for political reasons and of course vitiates the environment and erodes morale.Top performers could find such situations extremely frustrating which is why in most large organizations executives despite being paid top dollar are not satisfied and content with their jobs.
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