Up Close and Friendly: A Study of Compassion and Favoritism by Human Resource Professionals

Abstract

We assess differences in human resource professionals’ displays of compassion and favoritism by observing the rigor with which participants in an experiment enforce an organizational rule. In our experiment, participants must decide to report (be rigorous) or not report (be lenient) a rule violation committed by an employee. Participants are randomly assigned to three scenarios varying in affective and psychological closeness: the employee violating the rule is a co-worker, a co-worker experiencing serious difficulties at home, or a close friend experiencing the same difficulties. We observe that staff and senior human resource managers act with compassion towards co-workers facing severe difficulties at home. We also observe that human resource professionals (with the exception of senior managers) tend to be more lenient towards their friends. Our model suggests that moral reasoning is a fundamental driver of compassion when participants have information about extenuating circumstances. However, moral reasoning seems to be inhibited in the presence of friendship, so that favoritism, when it exists, is produced entirely by the direct effect of adding friendship to the decision context.