Workplace Favoritism and Workforce Sustainability: An Analysis of Employees’ Well-Being

The goal of sustainability in business is the maximization of resources for long-term productivity at a minimized negative impact for all key stakeholders. Several functions of human resources management are designed to achieve this goal. However, HRM practices can sometimes spiral down and result in the perception of favoritism–a practice that recruits or rewards relationship over merit. Hence, this project was designed to measure the impact of favoritism on the development of a sustainable hospitality workforce through the measures of subjective well-being, psychological capital, and knowledge hiding behavior. With the aid of randomly selected employees and estimation of structural models, the study validates the deleterious impact of favoritism and organizational politics on employee outcomes and by extension the sustainability of the workforce. Practical and theoretical recommendations are provided.