Someone you trust puts forward a candidate: a relative, a friend's son, a request from a senior colleague. Should you hire people you know, and where does a referral become wasta?

In Kuwait, wasta reaches well beyond who gets hired. A study based on 24 semi-structured interviews, published online in 2024, concludes that, because it disrupts standard practice, wasta "not only influences access to employment but also impacts employees' professional development and their entire performance throughout their time with an organization." Its own recommendation is a recruitment system that evaluates candidates anonymously, "exclusively based on their merit", backed by fines for firms found to have recruited fraudulently.

Once people are inside, wasta shows up in appraisals. A 2024 study of multinationals operating in Jordan, drawing on 43 in-depth interviews and company documents, found local managers using wasta to secure their own authority. They "dispense patronage to insiders and marginalize outsiders", and the outsiders included expatriates as well as more vulnerable local employees. The researchers found this most visible in performance appraisal, which "may serve as a basis for the differential treatment and rewards of employees". One pattern in the interviews: managers blocking grievances raised by employees with weaker connections.

In recruitment, it helps the insider and shuts out the rest. Seventeen HR, recruitment and line managers from 14 banks in Jordan, interviewed for a 2024 study, identified recruitment and selection as one of the main practices affected by wasta. The study describes benefits within the exchange itself, a job for the candidate and advantages for the organisation, alongside "social and economic exclusion of others outside the Wasta network". In these interviews the benefit held only where wasta was used "as a way to network or recommend rather than force or pressure"; many interviewees saw it instead as a powerful intermediary pushing a hiring decision. The sample was found through the first author's own contacts and covers one sector in one country. (Read in library)

Managers who use it name the benefits and the costs. In a 2023 study, fourteen participants from Lebanese industry were interviewed: five owners and senior managers, five middle managers and four team members; three were women. The paper reports them describing wasta as useful in "securing jobs, removing red tape, and gaining employment for humanitarian reasons", and its costs as "the employment of unqualified individuals, a reduction of organizations' productivity and a further weakening of formal institutions". These are participants' accounts; the study did not measure productivity.

Favouritism among colleagues: one survey, read narrowly. A 2022 survey of hotel employees in Nigeria (518 usable questionnaires, as reported) found favouritism associated with more knowledge hiding among colleagues (path coefficient 0.214) and with lower psychological capital (−0.136). These are associations from a single cross-sectional survey outside the Gulf, not effects; the paper also has reporting inconsistencies, listed in its source note below.

One study we set aside. A 2025 survey of 267 nurses at one public hospital in Egypt reports on nepotism and perceived organisational fairness. We did not rely on this study's quantitative finding because its published tables report conflicting directions for the relationship between nepotism and organizational justice. (Read in library)

What the youth wage study can, and cannot, tell us. A survey of about 10,000 people aged 15 to 29, mainly designed to be nationally representative of youth in Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (the SAHWA Youth Survey, 2016), included a yes-or-no question on nepotism; 91% of respondents reported nepotism as an issue. For the 2,574 respondents with wage data, the authors model the logarithm of wages separately for men and women. The nepotism coefficient was positive and statistically significant for young men (0.295) and slightly negative and not statistically significant for young women (−0.030). In the authors' words, nepotism "does not seem to help females with their wages, contrary to males". (Read in library) Four limits apply:

• The question records whether a respondent sees nepotism as an issue, not whether they found their own job through connections.
• The coefficients are on the logarithm of wages, so they are not direct percentage changes.
• The pattern is a correlation in survey data; it does not show that nepotism causes higher wages.
• A significant coefficient for men and a non-significant one for women do not, by themselves, show that men and women differ. We found no test of that difference in the paper, and the estimate for women rests on a smaller group (671 against 1,903 men) and is less precise.

In Saudi Arabia, networks have opened up for women. Twenty-six Saudi professional women, interviewed for a study published online in 2024, described more direct access to networks as formal institutions changed, "enabling them to attain jobs and progress their careers". The authors treat wasta as a negative practice and other informal networks as beneficial.

On referrals, the research here is thin. A qualitative study of 25 salespeople in Toronto who had obtained a job through a referral at some point in their careers, published in 2019, starts from earlier sociological research finding that referred employees typically stay longer than others; the interviews themselves do not compare referred and non-referred employees or test that finding. Twelve of the 25 had been referred to their current job. The study finds that what the referral meant depended on the person's plans: information about the job mattered to people with clear career plans, support from the person who referred them to those without. It is one small study from outside the region. (Read in library)

The case for connections rests more on argument than on measurement. A 2024 conceptual paper argues that wasta is a form of social capital that builds employee loyalty and innovation in Arab workplaces; it proposes a model and reports no new data. Among the empirical studies, the Lebanese and Jordanian banking interviews describe real benefits to the candidate and the organisation, and the youth survey finds reported nepotism associated with higher wages for young men.

The case against is broader but mostly qualitative. Interviews in Kuwait, Jordan and Lebanon describe wasta distorting hiring, development and appraisal, and one survey in Nigeria associates favouritism with more knowledge hiding among colleagues. Three of the interview studies, the Jordanian banking, Lebanese and Saudi studies, share an author, and two of those share further authors. That is overlap between research teams, not evidence that the studies reuse the same data, but it means their agreement is less independent than their number suggests.

Neither side has what a decision-maker most needs: a comparison, in the region, of how people hired through connections perform and how long they stay, against people hired without them. We found none.

Use connections to find candidates, never to choose them. This is our practical recommendation, informed by limited evidence; no study here tests it. A connection is information: it tells you that someone exists and that someone vouches for them. It becomes wasta when it changes the process: a skipped interview, a softer standard, a decision made before the shortlist. The Jordanian banking interviews draw the same line, between wasta used to recommend and wasta used to pressure. The costs are described consistently across several countries, mostly in interviews and partly by the same research team. None of the studies measures whether what an organisation gains outweighs them.

Confidence, claim by claim:

• Hiring: moderate. Interview studies in Kuwait, Jordan and Lebanon all describe connections deciding who is hired and outsiders shut out. They are qualitative, with small samples (24, 17 and 14 interviews), and two of them share authors; the Jordanian banking study found its participants through the first author’s own contacts.
• Development: low. Mainly one study (24 interviews in Kuwait), which concludes that wasta follows employees into their professional development.
• Appraisal and grievances: low. One study (multinationals in Jordan), though a substantial one: 43 interviews plus company documents.
• Performance and retention of people hired through connections: very low. None of these studies measured performance. The only retention finding is earlier research cited by the Toronto study, from outside the region.

1. Record every connection. When a candidate arrives through someone, note who introduced them and how they are connected, before the first interview.
2. Same process, no shortcuts. Connected candidates meet the same criteria, sit the same interview and are scored in writing before the panel discusses them. The Kuwait study goes further and recommends screening candidates anonymously, on merit alone.
3. Take the introducer out of the decision. The person who made the connection does not interview, score or approve that candidate.
4. Check your appraisals, not only your hiring. The Jordan study found wasta at work in appraisals and grievances. Look at whether ratings and promotions cluster around people with strong connections, and give employees a way to raise a grievance that does not run through their own manager.
5. Open development up. Publish the criteria for training places and development programmes, so that access does not depend on who someone knows.

Two of the studies are from the Gulf: 24 interviews in Kuwait and 26 with Saudi professional women. The others come from Jordan, Lebanon, North Africa and Egypt, the wider Arab region, Nigeria and Canada, so the pattern is regional rather than specifically Gulf.

The Saudi study adds the distinction most useful to employers here: as formal institutions have changed, networking has opened up for women, and the problem it identifies is wasta, not networking.

In mixed Saudi and expatriate teams, one finding from Jordan is worth watching for: expatriates were among the outsiders sidelined by managers' use of wasta. None of the studies we found asks whether the same happens in Gulf workplaces.

The ten research sources below are open access, published under CC BY 4.0, with the licence verified per article through Crossref. All are academic journal articles; none was published by a company that sells hiring or HR services. Years are those of first online publication; where the journal issue carries a different year, it is given in brackets. Source 5 is listed but not used in the analysis.

1. The powerful influence of connections: exploring the effects of wasta informal networks on human resource development in Kuwait — Human Resource Development International, 2024 (2025 issue)
2. Managing upward and downward through informal networks in Jordan: The contested terrain of performance management — Human Resource Management, 2024
3. Emic and Etic Perspectives on HR Practice for Managing Human Resource Issues Affected by the Prevalence of Informal Networks in Arab Countries — Administrative Sciences, 2024
4. Navigating wasta in business practices in Lebanon — Thunderbird International Business Review, 2023
5. Authority, favoritism, and fairness: how paternalistic leadership and nepotism shape nurses' perceptions of justice — BMC Nursing, 2025. Not used: its Table 3 reports a negative correlation between nepotism and overall organisational justice (−0.337), while its Table 4 reports a positive one (+0.600) and positive correlations with all five justice dimensions. We cannot tell which is correct.
6. Workplace Favoritism and Workforce Sustainability: An Analysis of Employees' Well-Being — Sustainability, 2022. Used narrowly: the paper's well-being findings are not used (the direct path was not supported, and the indirect path is reported as significant at z = −1.66, which does not meet the usual 5% two-sided threshold). Its questionnaire count does not add up (552 returned less 35 excluded is 517, not the 518 reported), and its direct well-being coefficient falls outside its own stated confidence interval.
7. Skill Mismatch, Nepotism, Job Satisfaction, and Young Females in the MENA Region — Econometrics, 2023
8. Unlocking Opportunities: How Women Navigate Informal Networks in Saudi Arabia's Evolving Workplace — Thunderbird International Business Review, 2024 (2025 issue)
9. How Career Identity Shapes the Meaning of Work for Referred Employees — Frontiers in Sociology, 2019 (2018 volume)
10. An investigation of the role of Wasta social capital in enhancing employee loyalty and innovation in organizations — Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2024 (conceptual paper)