Ammon News - AMMONNEWS -By: Hanin Ahmed Ibrahim Kreishan.

Nepotism is one of the most global issues that threatens the business industries and affects its existence based on jobs discrimination practices.
Nepotism is “a favoritism shown to relatives or close friends by those in power (as by giving them jobs)” as defined in the “vocabulary.com”.

Nepotism elicits from the Italian word “nepote” which means “nephew” in English. In 17th Century many people promoted their nephews to powerful positions at the expense of other candidates. Therefore, the word comes to describe favoritism that serves a family member or a friend and may be more than one member. For example; a daughter or a son of a powerful Chairman, they will not be worried about anything because they can still grant beneficiaries of nepotism from their Dad power. Consequently, don’t wait people do respect them, unless they worked hard and they have really earned the title without using such power even to get involve to that business.

Nepotism is away to get work, positions, and benefits by those people who do not really deserve to take them. This impacts negatively on the workplace to achieve its organizational targets; for example a daughter or / and a son of a Chairman has been given a high level position at a workplace because of their father’s authority turning a blind eye to their real lack of experiences and knowledge for the same position field.

Consequently, that will affect negatively on the organizational micro level as cooperation between colleagues and other employees will be held more sensitivity and clashes at the work atmosphere, which reflects on the organizational macro levels; such as dealing with customers’ needs in order to achieve the organizational customer’s satisfaction. And finally it reflects on the company’s target and goal (organization profit). Capability and competency are the main factors to make a person fit to any organizational position. If the person has real knowledge about any position he or she has applied for, they will

absolutely obtain the job, because any organization will take into consideration not to lose such an opportunity for having a multi-skilled person to join their teams, and shares his/ her valuable experiences that help to enrich any organization knowledge, in order to obtain the profits.

Chaim Fershtman, Uri Gneezy, and Frank Verboven in their book “Discrimination and Nepotism: The Efficiency of the Anonymity Rule” argued that discrimination and nepotism are considered as conceptual classifications that focus on the efficiency consequences of mystery rules. To illustrate the equity/ efficiency trade-off, the writers choose to use a game to clarify the idea which is called the trust game, and includes better treatment of individuals’ yields a larger overall outcome for two players. In principle, one may choose different types of games and consider the effect of ethnic affiliation on the choice of strategy. While a director game may better demonstrate discriminatory preferences, the writers focused on policy implications, and therefore they used the trust game, in which there is interaction between the players and the degree of discrimination directly affects the total surplus to be divided between them; hence, the equity/ efficiency trade-off is transparent.

The trust game involves two players, A and B. At the first stage, player A is given a fixed amount of money and is asked to decide whether to transfer part of it to player B. The amount transferred is automatically tripled, and player B then needs to decide how much he wants to transfer back to player A. The efficient outcome, which maximizes the total outcome, would require player A to transfer all his resources to player B (as these resources would then be tripled). The sub game-perfect equilibrium, on the other hand, implies no transfers. The outcomes of the experiment are typically different from this equilibrium. The experiment by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) confirmed that player A typically sends a positive amount of money to player B, who often returns an even larger amount. In such an experiment, the amount that player A transfers to player B serves as an indication of trust or cooperation between them. Thus, whenever a player is more trusted or there is more cooperation between players, the overall outcome is larger. In the trust game, the use of an anonymity rule to eliminate nepotism may promote equity, but it may also reduce overall gains (efficiency). However, one may also consider different classes of games in which favorable treatment reduces overall gains (although it may redistribute those gains between players). In such games, the use of an anonymity rule to
eliminate nepotism may introduce the equity/efficiency trade-off, while the use of such a policy to fight discrimination may be both efficient and equity enhancing.

Finally, “parachuted” to a job place becomes infamous to the person who used nepotism, but will not build respect nor well cooperation with others, as it hits the organizational systems ethical and objectivity. The lack of knowledge, capability, and competency for those people will impact negatively on the organization goals as well.

hanin.kreishan@hotmail.com