Abstract
Nepotism is one of those commonsense concepts that almost everyone claims to understand, and at least in western cultures, it has a distinctly negative connotation. As their example of the use of the term, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary (accessed 28 February 2012) states: ‘Nepotism has hurt the company’. But does nepotism, the organizational practice of favoring someone for work-related benefits such as job appointments and training opportunities really hurt companies? Is it therefore something that should be disparaged by employees and outlawed by those who run organizations? Those basic questions are posed by Nepotism in Organizations, the latest entry in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Organizational Frontiers series. To address them, the editor states in the preface that nepotism will be analyzed by this volume through a descriptive lens of human behaviors and psychological characteristics rather than through a normative lens that attempts to present it as either ‘good or bad’ in a values-sense. This entry is particularly welcome because nepotism is, simultaneously, a phenomenon that is pervasive in work organizations and always has been, and something that has barely been researched at all by organizational psychologists. Sparking research interest on the topic is clearly one of the goals of this volume, and for the most part, the contributors raise questions that are interesting enough to merit doing so. And, since the chapters are primarily conceptual rather than empirical in nature, the contributions are not chock-full of statistical analysis and technical jargon that is typically off-putting to practitioners either.
Beyond a series forward and preface, Nepotism in Organizations is organized as 11 chapters. In Chapter 1, Robert G Jones, the editor, tackles the issue of defining a psychology of nepotism. Jones questions the traditional pejorative perspective on nepotism by noting that modern organizations have incentives to become more ‘family friendly’ in order to attract talented employees, and that advances in evolutionary psychology raise the issue of whether the pervasiveness of nepotism might mean that it is adaptive for organizations, helps them survive. He argues for a systematic study of the phenomenon and provides an overview of the specific contributions of other chapters. Chapter 2, by Charles Gutman, addresses the issue of nepotism from an employment law perspective. Many companies have anti-nepotism policies, and Gutman does a thorough job of discussing the legality of these policies, and of nepotistic practices, from a US constitutional and state law standpoint. A large number of court cases, most dealing with adverse impact and disparate treatment issues, are discussed. The upshot seems to be that anti-nepotism policies have historically been deemed ‘rational’ and thus upheld by courts, but in some cases, female litigants have been able to successfully argue that these policies adversely impact women, if an anti-nepotism policy prevents a female spouse of a male employee from joining the organization. The third chapter, by Paul Muchinsky, drills deep into definitional and conceptual issues. Muchinksy makes the case that defining nepotism is more complex than is commonly realized. He develops a typology of five different types of nepotistic organizations, ranging from complete (all employees are related by blood) to isolated (only a tiny minority of employees are related to each other). He also notes that nepotism can influence a wide range of career stages, from initial vocational selection (‘following in father’s footsteps’) to recruitment, selection, training, and succession processes. He also draws on organizational justice theory to discuss nepotism as a source of conflict among employees. The introduction of a typology of nepotistic organizations and the care with which Muchinsky defines the term and its areas of organizational impact provides a useful stimulus to research on this topic.
Chapter 4, by Van Hooft and Stout, focuses on the impact of nepotism on an employee’s career choice, job choice, and job search behavior. These authors argue that family members may accept nepotistic career/job opportunities because family socialization is likely to enhance the perceived ‘fit’ between the individual’s values and interests and the career/organization, and because their feelings of self-efficacy in that domain should be higher as well. However, the authors also note that the beneficiary of nepotistic career opportunities who do not really want to pursue the family calling may experience stress and anxiety, because they are likely to experience social pressure from family members who may disparage their choices.
Taking a more sociological turn, Chapter 5 (Dickson, Niemenen, and Biermeier) examines the likely impact of nepotistic practices on an organization’s culture. They draw on attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) theory to describe how nepotism tends to create ‘homogeneous’ organizations. This grounding in ASA theory allows the authors to develop a number of testable propositions about how nepotistic practices impact on both family members and people unrelated to family members within the organization with regard to the desirability of working for the organization, selection processes, and impact on employee attrition. Because of the large number of theoretically grounded propositions, this chapter is arguably the most useful starting point for researchers interested in nepotism but looking for a place to frame a research question. This chapter might be best paired with Chapter 9 (Wated and Sanchez), which posits that collectivist social cultures (in the Hofstede sense) such as found in Latin America, predisposes managers to practice and tolerate nepotism, because collectivism values group solidarity and the ultimate ‘in-group’ for an employee is the family.
Similarly, Chapter 6 (Becker), which focuses on the relationship between nepotism and work commitment, is also a standout contribution. Becker leverages Meyer and Allen’s three-component model of commitment to discuss how different commitments may lead to dysfunctional conflict when nepotism is present, particularly in founder-successor circumstances. One weakness of this chapter is that Becker discusses the impact of different kinds of commitment on nepotism as if these commitments are experienced in isolation rather than as profiles. Chapter 7 (Masuda and Visio) covers the impact of nepotism on work-family issues. These authors argue that nepotistic practices might benefit the organization and the employee. For the employee, nepotism may facilitate the management of the work-family boundary by helping blend these multiple and often conflicting roles, particularly in the case of dual-career couples, leading to work-family enrichment, not conflict, and better productivity for the organization. However, the authors do not discuss how nepotism might be perceived by single employees who do not benefit from it.
In contrast to previous chapters, which tend to avoid ascribing moral or ethical qualities to nepotism, Chapter 8 (Mhatre, Riggio, and Riggio) adopts the traditional view of nepotism as inequitable. They contend that ‘unfairness’ is an integral aspect of nepotism and is incompatible with authentic leadership in organizations. They provide an enlightening overview of evolutionary, cognitive, and relational determinants of nepotistic behavior in order to help leaders understand it better and resist its temptations.
Chapters 10 and 11 provide the conceptual capstones to the volume. Bridgette Mulder (Chapter 10) builds on previous chapters and draws on findings from organizational justice and affirmative action literatures to develop a comprehensive model of the antecedents and consequences of organizational nepotism. The discussion of consequences is particularly helpful, as Mulder thoroughly evaluates possible individual, workgroup, family, organizational, and societal consequences of organizational nepotism, both positive and negative. In contrast, the discussion of antecedents is so all-inclusive that it has a ‘kitchen sink’ feel to it. One gets the idea that most everything impacts on nepotistic practices, so this aspect of the model doesn’t help the nepotism researcher develop focused research questions, which it would if it differentiated among likely and unlikely causes. In Chapter 11, the editor attempts to tie together the most provocative ideas developed in the volume to provide would-be nepotism researchers with guidance about where to start their investigations. Jones proposes that researchers should focus on two general issues: whether nepotism positively or negatively affects organizational effectiveness, and whether nepotism is ethical or unethical. Disappointingly, or perhaps inevitably, given the paucity of research on the topic, Jones concludes that the best we can do at this point is say that in both cases, ‘it depends’ on a variety of factors. Teasing out these contingencies should therefore be the task of future researchers.
Overall, I recommend Nepotism in Organizations to researchers and practitioners interested in this pervasive but not well-understood organizational issue. As is usually the case with a SIOP Frontiers volume, the editor has assembled some of the top contributors in the nepotism field and despite some qualms expressed in this review, every chapter delivers enlightening information. Researchers should find fruitful avenues of inquiry in all of the contributions, and the chapters on nepotism and legal (2), commitment (6), and work-family interface (8) issues are likely to be of particular benefit to practitioners interested in the ramifications of nepotism in their firms. That said, I admit that the volume’s assumption of ethical neutrality was off-putting to me. The editor and contributors did not convince me that nepotism should be studied descriptively rather than normatively, from a purely objective-scientific point of view, and admit that after reading the volume I still held to my preconceived belief that favoring family members for organizational benefits regardless of merit is a ‘bad thing’ that organizations should not tolerate, even if it sometimes helps an organization be more effective in achieving its goals and objectives. In my view, issues of justice and fairness should sometimes trump those, and nepotism is one of those cases.