• Corpus ID: 523086

2 CRONYISM : ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES

@inproceedings{Khatri20002C,
  title={2 CRONYISM : ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES},
  author={Naresh Khatri and Cheng Wen},
  year={2000}
}

• Naresh Khatri, Cheng Wen
• Published 2000
• Business

Cronyism is favouritism shown to associates without regard to their merit/qualifications. In “real” politics, the associated dangers and economic damages of cronyism were brought to surface by the recent Asian upheaval. What triggered our interest in the topic is whether cronyism is applicable to the organizational context. We believe that cronyism is quite prevalent in organizations. However, it is a neglected concept and has not received due attention from scholars. Thus, to better our understanding of the dynamics and implications underlying cronyism, we present two models (an antecedents model and a consequences model) in this paper and discuss a number of propositions that follow from the models. We briefly examine the origin of the term, cronyism, and its relevance in “real” politics and organizations, and then provide a comprehensive definition of cronyism and distinguish it from other related constructs. This is followed by development of a two-stage conceptual model of cronyism antecedents. The model is grounded in the Chinese/Asian cultural context. We argue that Confucian values, lack of trust, collectivism, and high power distance raise the importance of certain desirable behaviours (loyalty and relations). These behaviours, in turn, lead to three important antecedents of cronyism: overemphasis on loyalty, overemphasis on relations, and formation of strong ingroups. In the subsequent section, we present a model on consequences of cronyism and assess the impact of cronyism on individualand organizational-level outcomes. We argue that cronyism may have desirable outcomes for certain individuals, but it may be counterproductive for the organization.