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Cronyism and Nepotism Are Bad for Everyone: The Research Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2015

Jone L. Pearce
Jone L. Pearce*
Affiliation:
The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jone L. Pearce, The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92617. E-mail: jlpearce@uci.edu
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Extract

Jones and Stout (2015) have made one claim that I would like to correct: There is substantial quantitative (and observational) research on the workplace and organizational performance effects of nepotism and cronyism. That these authors have missed this research is understandable; the research is not in traditional industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology publications (although some of it does appear in journals from the related field of organizational behavior). Nevertheless, this work is systematic and rigorous, and the work provides strong evidence to support the experience-based perceptions of practitioners that nepotism and cronyism damage employees and their supervisors and produces poorer organizational performance. I welcome the opportunity that Jones and Stout (2015) have provided to briefly introduce my colleagues in I-O psychology to this literature.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 41 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2015 

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