Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers’ Power Affects Employees’ Reactions to Referral Practices

Abstract

In this paper, we explore referral-based hiring practices and show how a referrer's power (relative to the hiring manager) influences other organizational members' support (or lack thereof) for who is hired, through perceptions of the hiring manager's motives and morality. We apply principles derived from the literature on attribution of motives to research on relational power to delineate a model that explains employees' moral evaluations of and reactions to referral practices based on the power relationship between a referrer and a hiring manager. Specifically, we predict that employees are more likely to see the acceptance of a referral from a higher-(as opposed to a lower-) power referrer as a way for the hiring manager to gain more power in the relationship with the referrer, thereby attributing more self-interested motives and more counterorganizational motives to the hiring manager in such situations. These motives are then associated with harsher moral judgments of the hiring manager, which in turn lead to less support for the hiring decision. We find support for our model in two experimental studies and two field studies. We discuss implications for the literature on referral practices, ethics, and observers' reactions to power dynamics.We thank participants of the behavioral lab at the management and organization department and the marketing department at the Smith School of Business for providing us with feedback on previous versions of our manuscript. We also thank Associate Editor Daan van Knippenberg and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback throughout the revision process. Finally, we thank Agnes Varghese and Nathan Maddix for their help in data collection. 615

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