Date: 25 February 2026
Every single working environment, especially in high-stakes places such as a Security Operations Center (SOC) or an enterprise defense team, consists of forces that are not represented in either the formal network topology or organization chart. In as much as informal relationships might enhance productivity and enable teamwork to occur, there are others who create divisions in the defense line, and deter a team work. One of the most destructive of these forces is favoritism, an inclination to have a preference towards others, which is quite unfair.
Engagement programs and culture change initiatives require a lot of money by companies. Yet, the majority of them do not result in any fruit when the practice of favoritism is conducted under the carpet. This causes toxicity which interferes with the workplace cultures when relationships supplant performance or security metrics. Learning the mechanics of favoritism and coming to understand its consequences is an essential first step towards building equitable high-performing and safe organizations.
Favoritism at Work is Pervasive in Nature
The forms of favoritism may be numerous as they may be open-ended prejudice or hidden biases performed under the level of consciousness. In its basic sense, favoritism is a scenario whereby the leaders give favors to certain people a handout or do not subject them to clearance as a matter of preference instead of merit, performance, or even the strategic requirement of an organization. This can include assigning favorite analysts high-profile forensics cases, giving them direct access to high-level training, or having more social time with members of an exclusive group, which can make them an exclusive administrative group.
The degree to which this vulnerability has spread within the industry can be determined through studies. The phenomenon of playing favorites in the workplace is not an isolated case of deviation, but it traverses sector lines and ranks within the company. Studies have shown that a significant proportion of executive have admitted that they find favouritism in promotions, and would promote favourites even when there are other applicants with more suitable certifications, demonstrating better threat-hunting abilities, and a better record of achievement. Nearly half of the employees are convinced that their manager has a particular favorite i.e. the favoritism is not happening in the shadows but can be traced and registered by those who have to experience the latency effects of favoritism.
Forms of prejudice vary but share grounds of mistreatment. Proximity bias favors those employees who are physically present in the SOC, which leaves a systematic disadvantage to remote analysts or those who are on the graveyard shift. Loyalty-based favoritism is a reward that is given on tenure basis to the old guard instead of the actual contribution to mitigation of threats. The issue of cultural bias gives preference to people of the same background and forms a closed circle where the decision-makers are favored.
The Immediate Erosion of Trust
Trust forms the invisible encryption key of how the effective teams function. Once team members have trust in leaders and fellow analysts, they do not hold back threat intelligence and take calculated risk and are willing to pull out the discretionary effort to fix systems. Favouritism kills this cryptographic structure and replaces the faith in protocols being observed fairly by the faith in self-serving interests and unofficial preferences by which access control decisions are taken.
The immediate impact is the most devastating as it is the loss of trust at different levels. The security personnel who might feel that others are being treated well will cease believing in the ability of leaders to fairly adjudicate on incidents. When an organization starts to promote or take someone on project based on individual relations that is a backdoor to success and not by merit the whole management system collapses. This loss is diffused throughout organizations and sows cynicism of proclaimed values and questioning whether the hard work in ensuring the network is secured will be rewarded.
The Crushing Effect of Motivation and Involvement
Whereas trust erosion attacks on an organizational infrastructure, the low morale that comes about due to favoritism is the attack akin to Denial of Service (DoS) attack of personal drive. Morale means the health of the system of employees in terms of work. High morale leads to engagement, productivity, and retention, which are fundamental measures of a healthy security team. Favors are systematically lethal to this measure since they indicate that hard work and patch rate of success are less significant than social networks.
When employees feel unwhitelisted, they feel that they are encountering a firewall to their development. First, they can strive to brute-force the issue and make greater efforts to overcome the disadvantage. The disappointment of having no ensuing increase in access privileges or rank, is however, demoralizing. When technical merit is rigged to favor connection rather than contribution, people see the futility of competition on technical merit.
Under the implicit contract of employment, it is assumed that hard work will pay to be rewarded with known status. This API relationship between performance and results is violated by preferential treatment. The lack of engagement among employees does not always imply that they deliberately sabotage the network, yet, their lack of investment has the same consequences: they fail to meet patch deadlines, they fail in their code review, or they minimize the level of service.
Declines in Productivity and Performance
The correlation between the favoritism and declining productivity has a cascading impact. At the individual level, demoralized workers just are not as productive; they choke the productivity and avoid complicated problems. This reduces the effectiveness of the aggregate output, which results in a measurable loss of output and compromised quality of the defense.
And even more to the point, favoritism distorts the tasks allocation. Preferred managers assign employees of choice, qualified or not, high-value projects, including dominance of AI-based defense tools. This results in situations where less favorable employees are given menial tasks such as analysis of logs or closing tickets the "grunt work" whilst the less productive favorites are given high-profile posts. This is a pattern that is a major resource management failure.
This is misplacement that produces adverse outcomes in security posture. It is not an optimal human capital because it does not match tasks and real skills. It overworks top performers who work on the ground and burns them out, whereas it underutilises the potential of those who are not working. It is an indication that high performance is being penalized with more workload, but average performance (when accompanied with favoritism) is being rewarded- the same reasoning as one should have to support a secure environment.
The devastating impact is on teamwork, which is the key to a SOC. Effective incident response needs trust and the sense that team success is beneficial to parties. Favoritism leads to latency through the creation of cliques. Employees are made reluctant to send threat intelligence that may advantage fellow employees. Knowledge hoarding replaces information sharing; innovation is postponed; and unsolvable security loopholes are not fixed.
The Cybersecurity Vulnerability: Favoritism as an Insider Risk
Although the morale erosion is very destructive, in high-stakes settings such as cybersecurity, favouritism translates to a serious weakness of the defence posture. Psychological divisions brought about by bias in SOCs and IT risk management generate literal security coverage gaps.
Security is based on the principle of the Zero Trust, but not only of networks, but also of personnel procedures. Favors breach this by breeding a group of employees that are in a trusted category and are not as scrutinized. In cases where a manager makes a favor to a particular engineer due to personal liking, the individual might end up giving the engineer more privileges than he/she should have or skip authorization processes. This shadows clearance forms a blind spot, in case of compromising a system through negligence or with bad motives the preferred employee makes the system unresponsive to the customary checks due to implicit trust.
Direct security implications are also brought about by burnout due to the injustice in the distribution of work. Some unpleasant employees usually have to do the mundane job like graveyard shifts, and logging. This translates into cognitive fatigue and alert fatigue. Knowing the glass is half empty, when able, and unnoticed, the eyes are more probably to overlook fine evidence of a cyberattack. On the other hand, preferred employees who are assigned high status positions without the qualification may not have technical grit to protect the organization in the event of a full-scale attack.
Long Term Cultural Implication
Cultural implications of such favoritism in the long run are even more deplorable and difficult to remediate--they are like a Persistent Advanced Threat (APT). The construction of culture is based on strengthened behavior. Favouritism when left uncheck rewrites the cultural DNA and goes on to work on the same false logic after certain instances of bias have stopped.
The implicit reaction to: How do you get ahead here? is the most dramatic cultural change. Performance and skill development is the answer, in healthy cultures. In those cultures that are rife with favoritism, it becomes: "Build relationships with the right people, be visible, and be in line with power. This shift, in which success is ascertained through table of relationship routing and not merit, shifts the nature of how people work.
This transformation gives birth to a cycle of self-replication. Training teaches behaviors which will lead to advancement and employees change their code to survive. This transforms when they are aware that they need to win over to become successful. It is through this socialization that favoritism is propagated because those people who ascended to power through favors become leaders who carry on such cycles. This cycle can be repeated until the process of favoritism is so deep-rooted that people cannot even imagine how it can be run using a different model.
Favouritism tainted cultures develop dysfunctional traits. It favors the politically savvy as opposed to the technically skilled. Energy is wasted in ensuring perceptions are buffered at the cost of improving the performance of security. Information circulation process is informal and it is channeled through favored individuals. Making decisions is shrouded, conducted in secret. It is the rule to avoid conflict as it is risky to rebel against the status quo.
It has also destroyed external stakeholder relationships. Customers understand when a security agency puts internal politics before requirements. Decisions made on the basis of favoritism make partners frustrated. Future talent will do recon on reputation, using reviews where there are favoritism problems. Even-handed competition is preferred by desirable outside personnel. This damaged reputation is increased by inner dysfunction, and a vicious cycle of talent leakage is created.
The programs of diversity and inclusion fail, because the majority of favoritism is founded on affinity bias. The organization makes such decisions as to hire individuals of the same demographics or backgrounds as the leader to homogenize views. Companies spend money to attract diversity and form cultures where a specific profile is the only one to advance. This causes squandering of resources, poor image, and loss of creative, asymmetric thinking that an array of team members bring.
Conclusion
Favouritism is a poisonous business phenomenon in itself, like a logic bomb, it is threatening the fundamental pillars of organizational life, which include trust, fairness and merit. It affects numerous dimensions: it compromises the cryptographic trust between teams, morale that fuel discretionary defense initiatives, it renders organizations less productive, it introduces security holes by circumventing authorization procedures and it contaminates organizational culture.
Organizational leaders (CISOs and Security Directors) have the last word: either to accept the drawbacks of favoritism with all its risks, or to work hard to achieve genuinely fair, Zero Trust environments where trust, morale, and performance can be developed. There are clear signs that the second road is not a question of idealism, but rather a healthy business and security measure to those who are concerned about the long-term sustainability.
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