Corruptive translation to global HRM practices: Performance appraisal and wasta logic in global PSFs operating in the Middle East

This article aims to examine how professional services firms (PSFs) in the Middle East reproduce the performance appraisal practice throughout navigating the logics of professional, bureaucratic, and community (e.g., informal connections). In this paper, we report on an in-depth case study of professional service firms by exploring how professionals balance between these logics by coupling institutional logics with a routine dynamics theory. The results show a more corrupt version of performance appraisal that is dominantly invoked by the logic of wasta at both the macro and the micro levels to alleviate the psychological and physical effort associated with navigating competing institutionalized logics. At the micro-level, two versions of performance appraisal are enacted and each is informed by different institutional configurations. The enactment of both versions created a contaminated ethical environment through which actors rich with informal connections become able to pursue their self-interested goals regardless professionalism and bureaucracy. This study contributes to HRM and institutional theory on the workings of wasta logic in professional service firms operating in non-Western contexts.