Nepotism is usually defined as friendly or any relation favoritism in the organization or anywhere. This is usually considered as a conflict activity. Many a time this activity comes under the fold of Office Politics and people fell for it because that ensure the job security to an extend.

In an office when a person gets better treatment then others not because of job performance that is Nepotism or favoritism. This is a very sensitive matter in today’s time because this directly impacts the High potential employees, they feel unfair and not satisfied with the work environment and eventually leave the organization. In both way its a loss, organization is losing the best talent because of unfair management skill of of manager and an skilled employees loses the spot which he/she deserves.

Nepotism is Good or Bad?

If we hire someone, we know the background of the candidate and we can expect the new hire to start working as per our expectation and the demand of our work requirement. Addition to this the level of comfort and understanding will be high. This is not always the case the new person also have to adjust with the other team members and if the team is observing the special treatment or strong bonding between the Manager & the new hire that leads to a number of questions of biasness.

Favoritism negatively impacts the employee engagement at workplace because of discrimination and employees outburst. organization always invest time, energy and money to step up the employee engagement culture by various activities or cultural change but if the employees are not participating with zeal to improve all effort get waste and results will be negative.

Anti Nepotism Policy

To avoid such situations most of the organizations follow Anti-Nepotism policy which break the cycle of Nepotism. Like many company’s have policy no blood relation hiring, which restrict to refer of hire any team member family to hire into the same company. Even later if employees marry, some company policies specify that one of the parties to the relationship must leave and find a different employer, especially if the two employees are in the same team or leadership line.

Anti-nepotism policies are great initiative for companies to outline expectations and establish guidelines should employees in the same organization in relationship or get married. The reason is because the impact of the relationship may lead to actions that will lead as favoritism or nepotism. A thoughtful anti-nepotism policy establishes the rules and potential consequences of employee relationships in the workplace before the company confronts the inevitable.