Wasta in business management: a critical review of recent developments and future trends in the tourism sector

Wasta is a concept that is widespread across the Middle East, and practiced as a common and acceptable culture in most Middle East based business organizations. While the wasta practice is common and is followed as part of the usual organizational culture in the Middle East, yet, its implications are not all positive for the overall employee and organizational performance, which will be highlighted in the current paper in detail. It encourages interpersonal connections and networking of individuals to be used in order to obtain jobs, based on personnel connection rather than merit, which has huge negative impacts on the business. This paper, therefore, presents a detailed discussion on wasta and its implications considering business organizations across the Middle East. The tourism sector will be the area of the focus for the present work. The impacts of such activities on the tourism sector are significant on recruitment, teamwork, training, reward system, and overall HRM practices, which raise questions on whether this concept should indeed be as common in practice as it is currently. This paper studied the phenomena of wasta in the Middle East in details and proposed framework for Wasta-free Management. Also, recommendation for practice for tourism sector in the middle East along with suggestions for further research are presented.