Polarization is increasing worldwide, but it is particularly acute in the United States because the political system is bipartisan and citizens are highly politically engaged, making this issue especially relevant. The booming research on affective polarization has already discovered many factors that influence the hostility toward other groups triggered by political division in different contexts. However, very little is known about how people deal with it in the workplace. Examining what is going on in terms of polarization in the workplace is crucial for two reasons. First, the workplace is a unique social space where people have little to no control over who they interact with, unlike other areas, such as the intimate life of a friendship. The second reason to pay more attention to the workplace is the intensity of these interactions. Americans spend about eight hours per workday in the office, a third of which is spent interacting with coworkers. Many of these conversations revolve around politics: 83% of American workers admit to having such discussions. Taking into account that a majority (60%) of workers consider political conversations in the workplace unacceptable, this widespread practice of discussing politics with colleagues presents a social paradox. This project aims to fill this void by investigating how being aware of coworkers' political views impacts team performance.
Using an American audience recruited online via Prolific platform, this pre-registered study is a first step in discovering how growing political polarization affects our everyday professional interactions. My main hypothesis is that work groups aware of their internal political disagreements are less productive than those without such known disagreements because the willingness to fully engage in information exchange is undermined by outgroup animosity. To test this hypothesis and measure the collective efficacy of the group, I developed an online platform where pairs of participants with different political views have to decode English words together, encoded in a sequence of emojis, and are required to engage intensively in a chat conversation to solve these puzzles. Before working together, I ask participants for their opinions on a bunch of politically polarizing information (such as abortion rights, gun control, and general preferences for one of the two major political parties in the U.S.) as well as neutral topics. Based on this information, participants are divided into pairs where they disagree on at least one politically charged issue and one neutral issue. I present the first results of the three-treatment design: In the polarizing treatment, group members were informed that they disagreed politically on at least one of the politically sensitive issues, whereas in the control treatments they were only informed about disagreements on neutral issues. In the additional endogenous information treatment, I let participants decide for themselves whether they wanted to know their partner’s political position. The results showed that participants who were aware of political disagreements with their partners were less willing to share work-related information, which had a negative impact on their group productivity.