Favoritism at Work: The Silent Killer of Culture and Mental Health.

If you find yourself defending promotions or rewards based on vague "gut feelings" rather than clear data, then trust is already fraying in your organization.

Accountability and fairness should not just be a policy; they should be visible in every decision. Tools like Perkflow turn recognition into transparent data, helping you spot and fix these gaps before they fracture your team.

Favouritism at work is a systemic issue that creeps in through unchecked discretion. Addressing it requires more than awareness. It demands redesigning your structures to prioritize evidence over intuition.

The Stress of Workplace Favoritism 

When colleagues get special treatment, it stresses everyone, even the favorites. People stay on edge, never sure if their work or ideas will actually count this week.

This fuels real tension, burnout, and a heap of unspoken fears and questions. The "favorite" tag quickly turns negative, piling on stigma.

Every day stress hits a breaking point, chipping away at productivity and, eventually, the company’s finances.

That ongoing pressure is a major driver of anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and full burnout. Favoritism keeps feeding it. Workers who feel overlooked build resentment, deep fatigue, and thoughts of walking away.

 The whole environment becomes a pressure cooker, ramping up conflict and draining people from every side. Sustained favoritism creates exactly this cycle: unpredictable rewards breed distrust, lower motivation, and push good people toward disengagement or leaving. 

Is Favoritism In the Workplace a Culture?

If someone asks that straight up, most people would say no; it’s not the whole culture, just a bad habit. But the real question hits harder: Do you really think favoritism just shows up once and disappears on its own?

It doesn’t. It sneaks in through small things we ignore:

• Skipping complaints from certain people
• Always praising the same faces
• Giving vague group shout-outs while ignoring individual wins
• Letting one person’s ideas dominate every time

These tiny moments create unspoken rules. Teams learn fast: who gets heard, who gets slack, who can miss deadlines without consequence.

When a leader bends a rule for someone, even with good intentions, it sets a precedent. Do it once, and not doing it next time for someone else looks like picking favorites. Trust cracks right there.

Favoritism often overlaps with other biases, making it even harder to spot and stop. The most obvious is nepotism. In the workplace, it is seen when a family connection gets priority over actual skills or performance. This directly damages diversity and inclusion, which are fundamental to fair workplace ethics.

Then there’s cronyism, the most unconscious. Why? People lean toward those who feel familiar (with the same background, culture, hobbies, or even race). In a remote or hybrid workplace, it affects the employee lifecycle.

Employees who feel overlooked pull back. They do the bare minimum, withdraw from team energy, or quietly spread resentment. That drags morale, collaboration, and results down.

Favoritism doesn’t stay small. It builds cliques, normalizes exclusion, makes people chase connections instead of results, kills honest effort, and pushes good talent out the door.

So no, favoritism at work isn’t the whole culture; it becomes the shadow culture everyone feels. And that shadow grows until it blocks the real work for almost everybody.

How healthy does your workplace actually feel right now?

Leading Fairly: The Leader’s Job

Managers basically hold the whole culture in their hands. If they’re not on board with fairness, no amount of company policies, audits, or fancy training sessions will fix what happens day to day.

Hold managers just as accountable for treating people fairly as you are for hitting targets. Put “equitable treatment of staff” right into their performance reviews. Let it not be buried somewhere; let it be up there with project results and numbers. Train them hard to spot bias and make things equitable, and keep checking in on it.

The message has to land clearly: letting favoritism at work slide doesn’t just hurt the team, it dents your own credibility as a leader. Turning a blind eye to favoritism isn’t being kind; it’s just avoiding the hard parts of leading.

You can give leaders tools, data, and support to face the discomfort, but at the end of the day, they have to choose accountability over staying comfortable. That’s where real change starts.

Leaders get the insights to lead fairly, teams feel seen and motivated, and the whole place levels up.

How Data Exposes Favoritism at Work

As earlier stated in this article, Favoritism survives in places where decisions rely on instinct instead of evidence.

When you hear  Phrases like “I trust my judgment” or “I just know who’s performing,” create blind spots large enough for bias to thrive. Data removes those blind spots instantly.

When recognition, promotions, and rewards are treated as measurable activity, not personal discretion, favoritism at work becomes visible rather than debatable.

Start by auditing everything that signals value inside your organization, like:

• Public recognition
• Spot bonuses
• Performance ratings
• Promotion approvals
• High-visibility project assignments

Each one is a data point. Without logging them, you’re managing culture in memory and assumption. Once tracked consistently, it allows you to measure whether favoritism at work is shrinking or silently repeating itself year after year.

Anonymous pulse surveys strengthen the picture.
Questions like:

• Do promotions feel fair here?
• Is recognition based on impact or visibility?
• Do the same people receive opportunities repeatedly?

Read through this survey and act on the data given. Recognition/ performance platforms make this possible at scale by capturing praise as structured data. Who recognized whom, for what contribution, and how often. Over time, patterns surface quickly.

You may discover:

• One manager rarely recognizes remote employees
• Praise consistently flows within the same social circle
• High-impact contributors appear nowhere in recognition data
• Awards rotate among a small group regardless of output

When the same names appear quarter after quarter, it is not a coincidence. It is workplace favoritism expressed through systems that lack oversight. The same analytical approach must extend to promotions and assignments.

Review historical decisions with three questions:

1. Who was considered?
2. Who made the decision?
3. What criteria justified the outcome?

If answers differ by manager or cannot be clearly documented, you don’t have a performance system. You have discretionary power disguised as evaluation.

Tie advancement to concrete indicators such as:

• Outcomes delivered
• Targets achieved
• Skills developed
• Cross-functional impact
• Peer and stakeholder feedback

Then, introduce calibration sessions where multiple leaders review candidates together. Shared visibility limits the influence of personal relationships, charisma, or familiarity. Transparency does what intention cannot: it restricts bias before it shapes outcomes.

Know this:

• Data does not accuse.
• It does not speculate.
• It does not rely on trust.

It shows precisely where favoritism at work is forming, early enough to correct it before it hardens into culture and becomes known internally as “just how things work around here.”

If you’re looking for a system that captures recognition as data, reveals patterns over time, and gives leaders visibility into how value is actually distributed, check out Perkflow, an employee recognition and performance platform built to turn everyday decisions into measurable insight.

Final Note

Favoritism at work is not a people problem. It’s a system problem. Culture follows what your systems reward, not what your values promise.

When favoritism in the workplace goes unchecked, the impact is quiet but severe:

• psychological safety erodes
• Stress and burnout increase
• Trust in leadership declines
• High performers disengage or leave

What must change is how fairness is managed.

Going forward, recognition should be treated as data, not memory. Promotions should follow visible criteria. Decisions should be reviewed collectively, not privately. Patterns must be audited over time to expose repeated bias.

Rather than asking leaders to “be fair,” build systems that make fairness unavoidable. Because lasting fairness doesn’t come from better intentions, it comes from better systems.