(Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash)
HOBOKEN, N.J. – If you have a sneaking suspicion your boss is playing favorites at work, you might be right — but it also could be a good thing! Researchers from the Stevens Institute of Technology say that some leaders intentionally treat certain employees better as part of a greater business strategy. In a nutshell, biased bosses can get better results from their employees — and not just the ones they favor.
“For leaders, playing favorites isn’t always a bad thing,” explains Haoying (Howie) Xu, an assistant professor of management at Stevens Institute of Technology and lead study author. “Favoritism is a double-edged sword — it can be harmful to team dynamics, but in the right circumstances it can also help organizations to succeed.”
The study authors looked at 200 different teams in several Chinese companies across different industries. The teams included over 1,100 employees. Both employees and supervisors completed surveys on their performance and team dynamics. Through these surveys, Xu and his colleagues could see how workplace favoritism interacts with other factors and how it impacts overall team performance.
Depending on the team dynamics, being highly favored by leaders helped or hurt the business. Teams that are already well structured, possibly because some employees were placed in positions of authority or because some employees showed advanced skill sets, showed a lower performance when bosses played favorites. Less structured teams with a biased boss ended up doing better across the entire study.
“That’s an important finding, because most previous research has focused solely on the negative impacts of workplace favoritism,” Xu explains in a university release. “Now, we’re getting a more nuanced view of the way that leadership biases play out in the real world.”
The findings test a branch of management science called the leader-member exchange (LMX) theory. Xu argues that the relationship between supervisors and employees differs based on leadership bias. Having noticeable favorites sends signals about the status of different team members, which causes different results depending on the already existing team structure. Teams with an established social hierarchy are more likely to have disagreements and conflict when there is a biased boss.
On the other end of the spectrum, teams with less of a pecking order did better when the boss clearly had a favorite on the team. Xu suggests this might be because leadership biases create structure and help people work together more effectively.
“When teams lack obvious hierarchies, it helps if the boss sends clear signals about who’s on top and who is expected to take a more subordinate role,” says Xu. “The key point is that playing favorite has clear positive and negative effects, so leaders need to ensure they’re paying attention to how their favoritism is affecting their team.”
There are other factors that influence how much leadership bias affects team performance, according to the researchers. Newer or recently formed teams are hurt more by workplace favoritism, for example. Future research will need to explore how favoritism works at different levels of organizations and for every individual team member.
The study is published in the journal Personnel Psychology.
