Playing the Favorite Game: A Contextual Examination of Workplace Favoritism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it