I don't think it will have a detrimental effect to our own website. However, I would like to see from other point of view: having a descriptive anchor text to external links may help your website campaign.
Descriptive anchor text is after all aimed to persuade / impulse our visitors to click on the link. If it's not really appealing, then they probably won't bother to click.
Given due to external links, making our visitors clicking the links will definitely bring benefit to that outsourced links: traffic. However, if those website are critical (and ethical enough), they will notice than some of their traffics are referred from your site. Moreover, if your site has even bigger influence to theirs, they will start investigating your site, whether yours is legit, content-related, has good credibility, etc.
If positive, then they may acknowledge you better and may even propose a mutual co-operation / agreement in the long terms.
That's just my opinion though however 
