How and When Guanxi Victims Ostracize Beneficiaries in Response to Leaders' Guanxi HRM Practices

Abstract

Leaders' guanxi human resource management (HRM) practices are prevalent in East Asian organizational contexts shaped by Confucian culture. In such settings, leaders often allocate limited resources to beneficiaries with whom they share guanxi, at the expense of victims who lose access to those resources. While prior research has primarily focused on the self‐directed consequences of leaders' guanxi HRM practices for victims, much less attention has been paid to the other‐directed behavioral responses—particularly from the perspective of interactions between guanxi victims and beneficiaries. Drawing from theories of social comparison and dual‐system self‐control, this paper develops a theoretical model to elucidate how and when leaders' guanxi HRM practices lead victims to ostracize beneficiaries. Across three studies conducted with Chinese samples, we found that leaders' guanxi HRM practices elicit both contempt (via downward comparison) and envy (via upward comparison) toward beneficiaries among victims, which in turn lead to ostracism of beneficiaries. Moreover, victims' orientation toward superficial harmony was found to weaken the relationship between contempt and ostracism, although its moderating effect on envy‐ostracism was not significant. The stronger the victim's tendency toward superficial harmony, the weaker the indirect effect of leaders' guanxi HRM practices on their ostracism toward beneficiaries via contempt. This paper advances the literature on guanxi HRM practices by shifting the focus from intra‐individual to interpersonal consequences and provides practical insights for managers to optimize guanxi‐based human resource decisions.