Workplace favoritism, in which a supervisor engages in ongoing preferential treatment of one or a few employees, is a common occurrence in many workgroups. Despite the prevalence of the phenomenon, however, workplace favoritism has not received much devoted scholarly attention in management research. Often the topic is studied either as one of many types of workplace mistreatment behaviors, through the lens of formal discrimination associated with nepotism/cronyism, or as a proxy when employees perceive dissimilarity in the quality of their relationships with their supervisor. Engaging in in-depth interviews with 77 individuals employed in the service industry and applying abductive methods, we uncover a previously unappreciated rich and complex set of interpersonal dynamics surrounding workplace favoritism. In this working model, we make sense of these dynamics by applying a role theory lens: conceptualizing workplace favorites as a special type of informal social role that can emerge in workgroups. How this role is enacted has important implications for non-favorites’ ongoing relationships with their supervisor, the favorites, and one another. Our research identifies five distinct favorite profiles that can emerge in workgroups and can range in terms of having a more benign versus antagonistic presence.
