The Office Favourite Phenomenon — How Proximity to Boss Beats Performance in India

There is always one person in every Indian office who seems to be doing better than the work they produce would explain.

They are the first name on the good projects. Their appraisal rating is consistently strong. When the manager talks about reliable people, that name appears. Not because the work is obviously outstanding sometimes it is, often it is average but because something else is also happening. Something that has nothing to do with the deliverable and everything to do with the relationship.

They sit near the manager's desk. They have lunch with them regularly. They are the person the manager calls when a thought needs to be tested informally. They know things about the team's plans before anyone else does. They are, in the specific language that Indian offices have developed for this person: the favourite.

Everyone sees it. Almost nobody says it directly. And the person who works hardest, delivers most consistently, and receives the least corresponding recognition sits two rows away, wondering what exactly they are doing wrong.

What Is Actually Happening And Why

The phenomenon has a name in organizational psychology: ingratiation-based favoritism. And it operates through mechanisms that are neither mysterious nor unique to India they are universal features of how human beings make assessments about other human beings when the criteria for assessment are ambiguous.

Performance, in most knowledge-work roles, cannot be measured cleanly. The quality of an analyst's thinking, the contribution of a project manager to a complex outcome, the value added by someone in a client-facing role none of these reduce to a number that a manager can verify independently. What the manager actually has access to is their direct experience of the person: how often they interact, what those interactions feel like, how present the person is in the manager's daily professional life.

When performance cannot be measured objectively, relationship quality fills the gap. The person who is most visible, most present, and most positively remembered by the manager gets assessed as most valuable not through any conscious decision to favor them, but through the natural cognitive process by which familiarity produces positive evaluation.

Social exchange theory, developed by Peter Blau in the 1960s and still central to organizational behavior research, describes this precisely: workplace relationships are based on reciprocal exchanges, and those who create frequent, positive exchanges with authority figures build a resource that influences how those authority figures assess them. The favourite is not always gaming the system. Sometimes they genuinely like their manager. But the result is the same either way.

Why India Specifically Amplifies This Dynamic

Favoritism in workplaces is global. But several features of the Indian professional environment make it particularly pronounced, and make its effects particularly difficult to challenge.

India's Power Distance Index score of 77 significantly above the global average means that hierarchy is deeply internalized rather than simply structurally present. In high power-distance cultures, the manager's judgment is rarely challenged directly. A performance rating that feels unfair, a project assignment that seems politically motivated, a recognition that appears unearned these are observed, discussed in private, and absorbed, but rarely confronted. The cultural norm of deference to authority protects the favoritism system from the friction that would expose it in a lower power-distance environment.

The collectivist social structure reinforces this. Relationships in Indian workplaces are not purely transactional. The web of social obligation, personal loyalty, and long-term relational investment that characterizes Indian social life extends into professional contexts in ways that make it difficult to separate genuine relationship quality from quid pro quo. A manager who genuinely likes someone who has shared meals with them, knows about their family, has a warm personal connection is not consciously running a favoritism calculation. They simply experience that person more positively. The personal relationship and the professional assessment are entangled in ways that both parties may be entirely unaware of.

A 2023 study published in the Asian Journal of Management and Commerce found a significant negative relationship between perceived organizational politics which favoritism is a central component of and job satisfaction in the Indian higher education sector. The finding generalizes: Indian employees who perceive their workplace as politically organized, where outcomes are more determined by relationships than results, show systematically lower engagement, lower satisfaction, and higher attrition intent than those who perceive assessment as fair.

Proximity Bias The Remote Work Revelation

The pandemic did something useful for understanding how favoritism works: it made proximity bias visible in a way it had never been before.

When workplaces went remote in 2020-21, a consistent pattern emerged across industries and countries: employees who were physically present in offices, or who were more active on video calls and messaging platforms, received better performance evaluations than those who worked equally hard but less visibly. The work product was the same. The visibility was different. The assessment was not.

Microsoft's 2022 Work Trend Index explicitly named this as one of the primary risks of hybrid work: managers consistently rated in-office employees higher than equivalent remote employees, not because the in-office employees were performing better but because their presence created more frequent positive interaction that the brain translated into competence and value. The tendency to favor those who are physically present became its own research category: proximity bias.

In the Indian context, the return-to-office mandates of 2022-24 reactivated proximity dynamics with full force. The employees who came in every day, who were visible in the office corridors, who happened to be present when the manager was thinking through a problem these employees rebuilt their proximity advantage, while remote colleagues, however productive, lost ground they may not even have known they were losing.

The Specific Behaviors That Create Favoritism

Favoritism is not simply a matter of liking someone. It operates through specific, reproducible behaviors that organizational behavior researchers have identified and categorized. Understanding them changes how the phenomenon looks less like a mysterious social force and more like a set of learnable interactions that some people engage in deliberately and others engage in naturally.

The first is visibility management: ensuring that the manager is aware of one's contributions, not through self-promotion in any blatant sense, but through consistent small signals the timely update, the unprompted share of a relevant piece of information, the brief check-in that keeps the manager's mental model of the person current and positive. The person who delivers excellent work silently, without ensuring the manager has accurate information about it, is not competing on equal terms with the person who delivers adequate work and ensures the manager knows exactly what was done and why.

The second is opinion alignment. Research on ingratiation in organizational contexts the strategic management of impressions to cultivate positive assessments from superiors identifies agreement with the manager's views as one of the most effective relationship-building behaviors in hierarchical environments. The person who consistently appears to share the manager's perspectives, who validates the manager's instincts rather than challenging them, who creates the experience of being understood and supported in the manager's presence, builds a reservoir of positive association that performance alone does not generate.

The third is availability. The favourite is rarely the person who is difficult to reach, who maintains strict boundaries between professional and personal time, or who is selectively responsive. They are the person who is available who responds quickly, who shows up when something extra is needed, who does not make the manager feel like a request is an imposition. This availability creates an experience of reliability that is distinct from the reliability of consistent output, and that may be more influential in the manager's assessment.

What the Person Who Is Not the Favourite Experiences

Arjun, 30, a senior analyst at a Bengaluru tech company, describes the specific experience of watching a colleague receive the assignment he had been preparing for across three quarters with a precision that comes from having examined it more than once.

The colleague was not more qualified. By any objective reading of their respective outputs, Arjun had produced more, on harder problems, with more consistent quality. But the colleague had lunch with the manager regularly. They spoke easily together. In team meetings, the manager's energy shifted slightly when the colleague spoke — not to attention, exactly, but to a kind of warm familiarity that was different from how the manager engaged with everyone else.

When the assignment went the other way, the official explanation was about the colleague's communication skills and stakeholder management. Both of those things were true. But they had not been requirements when the project was described. They appeared in the explanation after the decision had been made.

The specific injury of this experience is not only the missed opportunity. It is the implied message about what is being evaluated. When performance does not produce the recognition that performance should produce, the conclusion is not always that the system is unfair. Often it is that something about this person specifically is inadequate that the failure of recognition reflects a failure to meet a standard that others are meeting and they are not. The self-assessment that follows is usually more damaging than the missed project.

The Organizational Cost That Leadership Rarely Accounts For

The damage of favoritism is not only personal. It is organizational, and it is measurable in ways that the organizations experiencing it tend not to measure.

A 2025 review published in the International Journal of Industrial Management synthesized research on workplace favoritism across multiple countries and identified its primary organizational consequences: reduced trust in management, lower employee engagement, increased intention to leave, and what the researchers described as the crowding-out of genuine performance by relationship investment. When the return on relationship investment exceeds the return on performance investment, rational employees redirect their effort accordingly — which means the favoritism system creates exactly the workplace culture it appears to reward.

The talent that most consistently leaves environments organized around proximity and relationship rather than output is the talent that has the most options — the high performers who do not need to invest in political relationships because their skills are portable. Their departure is rarely attributed to favoritism in exit interviews, because naming it directly carries social risk even on the way out. It appears in the data as better opportunity, which is accurate but incomplete.

What replaces them, in organizations where this pattern is persistent, is a population increasingly selected for relationship management rather than capability — which compounds the problem across successive hiring cycles in a way that is slow, invisible, and extremely difficult to reverse.

What the Person Outside the Inner Circle Can Actually Do

The most honest answer to what someone who is not the favourite should do is also the least satisfying: the system has structural advantages for certain behaviors, and navigating it requires engaging with those structures honestly rather than pretending they do not exist.

This does not mean becoming a version of the favourite that feels inauthentic. It means understanding that excellent work that is invisible to the decision-maker is not, in practice, excellent work — it is potential that has not been converted into recognized value. Making work visible does not require self-promotion in any uncomfortable sense. It requires ensuring that the manager has accurate and current information about what is being done and why it matters. The update that seems unnecessary because the work speaks for itself is only unnecessary in a world where the work actually speaks and most Indian workplaces are not that world.

Building genuine relationships with the manager not strategic ingratiation, but actual human interest in what the manager is trying to accomplish and honest engagement with it — changes the quality of the assessment that manager makes without requiring anyone to compromise their integrity. The favourite's advantage is often simply that the manager knows them better. Becoming someone the manager knows better is available to anyone.

And when the environment is one in which the gap between relationship and performance has become too wide to navigate where the system is not merely imperfect but actively hostile to the kind of contribution someone wants to make the most useful thing is an accurate assessment of that reality rather than continued investment in a context that has already demonstrated its priorities. Some organizations reward proximity. Others reward output. Knowing which one you are in is the prerequisite for any useful decision about whether to adapt to it or leave it.

What Organizations Can Do And Rarely Do

The structural interventions that reduce favoritism are well-documented in the organizational behavior literature. Calibration sessions where multiple managers compare and challenge each other's ratings reduce the influence of individual relationship bias on assessment outcomes. Criteria-based evaluation frameworks that require managers to document specific behavioral evidence for each rating reduce the space available for relationship-based halo effects. 360-degree feedback systems that include peer and subordinate input alongside manager assessment provide a counterweight to the upward relationship dynamic that favoritism exploits.

These interventions work. The research on structured assessment processes consistently finds that they reduce bias and improve the correlation between actual performance and assessed performance.

They are also underimplemented, particularly in mid-size Indian organizations where the HR function has formal processes but limited authority to enforce them against the preferences of senior managers who have spent careers building the informal relationship networks that structured assessment is designed to counteract. The process exists on paper. The calibration session becomes a rubber stamp of the manager's prior decision. The 360-degree feedback is administered but not weighted in any way that changes the outcome. The structural intervention and the organizational culture pull in opposite directions, and the culture is heavier.

The organizations that genuinely reduce favoritism are ones where the senior leadership has made the connection between favoritism and talent loss and between talent loss and business performance specific enough that addressing it becomes a priority rather than a value statement. That connection is available in the data of any organization that tracks attrition with sufficient granularity. Whether it is made explicit is a choice that determines whether the gap between the official meritocracy and the actual one narrows or stays where it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is office favouritism and how is it different from genuine performance recognition?

Office favoritism is the consistent preferential treatment of an employee based on relationship quality or proximity to the decision-maker rather than on documented performance outcomes. It differs from genuine performance recognition in that the basis for the preference is the manager's felt experience of the person how familiar, available, and positively associated they are rather than any verifiable output. The distinction is often invisible because the same behaviors that create favoritism can coexist with genuine capability. The diagnostic test is whether the same level of output from a person outside the manager's inner circle would produce the same recognition and in favoritism environments, it usually does not.

Q2. Why is favoritism more pronounced in Indian workplaces specifically?

India's high power distance score of 77 means hierarchy is deeply internalized, making favoritism difficult to challenge directly. Employees who perceive unfair treatment are far less likely to name it to the decision-maker than in lower power-distance cultures. The collectivist social structure entangles personal and professional relationships in ways that make it genuinely difficult to separate warm regard from biased assessment. And the prevalence of relationship-based professional culture across Indian industries means that political navigation has been historically adaptive; the skills that support favoritism are the same skills that have historically been rewarded, which reinforces the behavior across generations of organizational culture.

Q3. What is proximity bias, and how does it operate in Indian offices after the return to work?

Proximity bias is the documented tendency of managers to rate employees who are physically present more favorably than employees who are equally productive but less visible. It was made explicitly visible during hybrid and remote work periods, when research consistently found in-office employees receiving better evaluations than remote equivalents. Microsoft's 2022 Work Trend Index identified it as a primary risk of hybrid arrangements. In Indian offices post-pandemic, the return-to-office shift has reactivated proximity dynamics: employees who are physically present for more of the working week, and who therefore create more frequent positive interactions with their managers, have rebuilt a visibility advantage over those who remain partially or fully remote.

Q4. What are the organizational costs of a workplace organized around favouritism?

The 2025 International Journal of Industrial Management review on workplace favouritism identified the primary organizational costs as: reduced trust in management, lower employee engagement, increased attrition intent, and the crowding-out of genuine performance by relationship investment. When the return on proximity and relationship exceeds the return on output, rational employees redirect effort accordingly creating a culture that rewards what it appears to penalize. The talent most likely to leave is the most portable high performers with options whose departures accumulate into a slow organizational capability decline that is rarely attributed to its actual cause in exit data.

Q5. Can someone navigate a favouritism environment without compromising integrity?

Yes and the navigation is more about visibility and genuine relationship than about strategic ingratiation. Making work visible to decision-makers through regular, accurate updates is not self-promotion it is ensuring that the manager has the information they need to assess accurately. Building genuine human interest in the manager's priorities and challenges creates the familiarity that the favourite has, without requiring anyone to manufacture false agreement or perform availability they do not actually have. The honest version of navigating this environment is understanding that excellent invisible work is not recognized work, and that making it visible is a legitimate and necessary part of the job not a political concession.

Q6. What structural changes actually reduce favouritism in organizations?

The interventions with the strongest evidence base are calibration sessions where multiple managers compare ratings and challenge each other's assessments, reducing individual relationship bias; criteria-based evaluation frameworks requiring behavioral evidence for each rating, reducing the space available for halo effects; and 360-degree feedback systems incorporating peer and subordinate input alongside manager assessment. These are well-documented and effective when genuinely implemented. The implementation gap where the process exists formally but is rubber-stamped by manager preference in practice is the primary barrier in Indian organizations. Genuine reduction requires senior leadership treating the favoritism-to-attrition link as a business problem with a financial cost, not as a values statement without enforcement.

The specific psychological experience of working hard without recognition and what sustained invisibility does to professional self-concept over time connects to the broader pattern of doing everything right and still feeling behind, explored in Why Many Indians Feel Tired Even After Doing Everything Right. And for the dynamics of workplace silence — why the people who see the favouritism most clearly are the ones least likely to name it — The Bystander Effect in Indian Offices — Why Nobody Speaks Up When Something Is Wrong covers that dimension in depth.