I feel as engineers we can take one of two career paths, administrative or research based. If you want to follow an administrative path, partiality is definitely an obstacle that will be faced. Partiality in the form of favoritism, talked about in the posts above (management’s policies are followed and respected), but there is also nepotism, cronyism, and more. I agree that to become successful in an administrative role you have to be congenial and have high regard for management. The positives of such a career is that your work will be recognized and rewarded. However, a research focused engineer will see less recognition, any will be directly associated with the company or upper management. The research engineer has the pleasure of conducting science. I feel it is very difficult of an engineer to be biphasic, i.e. have both a strong administrative and research position. IF the struggle of climbing the corporate latter is too unethical for you, stay a research focused engineer.