According to a new study favouritism in the workplace plays a larger role in employee advancement than people would care to admit.Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business indicates that connections and relationships play a significant role in employee promotions despite policies and procedures at most companies designed to lower the impact of non-objective assessment and despite general acknowledgment that such favouritism leads to bad decision making.The study was conducted by research firm Penn Schoen Berland (PSB) and commissioned by Jonathan Gardner, an executive at PSB, as part of his studies in the Executive Master’s in Leadership program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.The vast majority of senior business executives surveyed (92 percent) say they have seen favouritism at play in employee promotions, including at their own companies (84 percent). But while nearly all see favouritism as widespread, many fewer (23 percent) are willing to admit they have practised favouritism themselves and only nine percent say they have used favouritism in their last promotion decision.Favouritism thrives despite procedures that 72 percent of respondents say their companies follow to make the promotions process more objective, and general agreement by 83 percent that favouritism leads to poorer decisions.Survey respondents tended to define favouritism as giving preferential treatment to employees based on factors other than qualifications and performance, such as friendship or connections.“This study confirms what many have suspected that favouritism plays a much greater role in employee advancement than companies normally portray,” Mr Gardner said. “I hope this study will help us acknowledge the prevalence of favouritism in employee promotions so that we can find ways to better understand the role it plays.”The research sheds light on how common it is for managers to know in advance who they want to promote. In fact, 29 percent of respondents said their most recent promotion considered only a single candidate. When more than one candidate was considered, 56 percent said they already knew who they wanted to promote before deliberations. Not surprisingly, of that group, nearly all 96 percent report promoting the preselected individual.