How to Deal With Political Polarization in the Workplace

Many of us try to avoid workplace discussions about electoral politics — along with conversations about topics such as guns, climate change, abortion, and religion — to maintain our collegial relationships. Many people do this intuitively to keep the peace with those they know they will disagree with.

Others don’t. A survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that in the wake of the June 2024 debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the number of reported uncivil acts in U.S. workplaces exploded to 201 million a day.

Some experts recommend mandates as a way to tamp down the heat within the workplace, arguing that “setting limits on political discussions at work might be a better option than watching the organization come apart at its seams.”

We question whether setting limits on political discussions by dictating when employees should remain silent is even a viable strategy when work and personal boundaries are as porous as they are today, especially when it comes to politics. Many working professionals interact through informal social media platforms as much as they do in face-to-face meetings. Access to information about colleagues’ personal views on nonwork issues is often readily available. Decreeing that people must stay silent on political issues also seems to run counter to the call for employees to “bring their whole selves” to work. Forbidding discussion of personal topics may be viewed as a step backward or worse: It could prompt turnover of younger employees, who may expect to be able to be transparent about politics at work.

The challenge is that most of us have personal views about public policy that affects our nonwork lives, and we tend to have strong, visceral reactions toward individuals whose views are different from ours. Equally challenging is that expressing one’s personal views can not only lead to division but also generate a climate of fear in the workplace. The level of emotional activation some people feel when encountering political disagreement can create a tinderbox situation.

It’s no surprise that managers may feel unprepared to deal with conflicts that arise from employees’ political conversations, which have the potential to be especially heated here in the U.S. in the final run-up to the November presidential election. There’s no clear road map to effectively manage polarization in the workplace. Here, we begin to develop one. We start by explaining the root causes of polarization. We then sketch out a process managers can put in place to better handle politically charged discussions at work when they occur.

Why Political Discussions Are So Polarizing

There are at least three intertwined elements that have made polarization such an insidious part of our social milieu. The first is that political issues are often viewed as moral issues and are associated with moral emotions like disgust and anger. As Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, argued in his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, political issues are processed intuitively rather than rationally. As a result, such subjects foster a sense of self-righteousness: “I am right (that is, moral), and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong (that is, immoral).”

Second, when individuals see political issues as moral issues (a process referred to as moralization), they also begin to see them as self-defining: “If my political stance is morally right, then I must also be a morally good person for holding that stance.” But it is not enough for people to view themselves as a moral person — this identity also needs external validation.

Thus, a third element that makes conversing about political issues so insidious both in society generally and in the workplace specifically is that individuals seek out others with similar positions to form what some call “moral tribes” as a form of validation. When people view themselves as part of a morally superior, more “correct” collective, they seek out others who share their beliefs. Once these tribes take form within the workplace, employees are more likely to engage in conflict with colleagues whom they view as belonging to the other side. The end result is seemingly intractable identity-related intergroup conflicts.

These conflicts are characterized by strong identity-narrowing. People tend to view people on the other side in simplistic terms: “Although my coworker is a soccer player, an engineer, and a mother, I only see her as [insert political party].” Moreover, once identities are narrowed to only the morally opposed one, it becomes impossible to find common ground because of mutual disidentification: Part of how I define who I am is by not being you. In short, political topics are polarizing because they involve the moralization of issues, which become self-defining and influence who I see as “with me” or “against me.”

Create a Process, Not a Statement

The goal for managers should be to put in motion a process that employees can use to work through moralized disagreements when they arise. After all, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to resolve the moral certitude individuals experience in their conviction regarding a specific dispute. Consider, for instance, the question of whether the company should release a statement in the aftermath of protests and social unrest to express its support or opposition. These statements often engender more dissatisfaction and division than sensitivity and fellowship because the organization’s position is often touted as being “morally right”; thus, anyone who disagrees with it must be “morally wrong.” As noted above, this leads to the moralization of issues and the resultant intractable identity-related intergroup conflicts. Silence by the organization overall might be an expedient strategy when disputes don’t have direct relevance to its core function.

Therefore, rather than expecting top leadership to deliver statements, managers should be prepared to facilitate a process that builds an understanding of, rather than consensus about, hot-button issues that have made their way into the workplace. The primary aim is not to change the minds and hearts of colleagues. It is not about winning the argument. Instead, a process designed to allow employees to talk without fear of exclusion, stigma, or retribution can provide organizations with a more effective approach to dealing with polarization among their ranks. We recommend the following steps to foster such engagement.

Step 1: Leaders Gather Information

How do leaders know when political conversation is infecting the workplace in destructive ways that require some kind of intervention?

One strategy is to track the number of complaints about political talk that come to your human resources department. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, reported in August that “Salesforce created a new policy asking employees to stop talking about the war in Gaza in its Slack channels, a move that came after the company felt some employees were spending too much time debating such issues. Executives were also presented with a hiring plan to add more human resources staff to help moderate the internal discussions, an indication for some that the discussions had gone too far.”

It’s certainly advantageous to know whether there’s a problem before HR gets involved. One way to find out is to ask employees to gauge their temperature on an subject. Researchers have demonstrated the value of providing employees with an actual representation of a thermometer and offering them the (voluntary) opportunity to mark how “hot” an issue is for them. This allows leaders to understand the emotional intensity of an subject — whether it’s an upcoming election or something else — without asking personal questions such as “Who are you voting for?” or even “Why is political talk upsetting to you?”

Gathering this kind of information is not necessarily a one-shot deal. Leading up to a volatile election, managers might consider soliciting information a full month out, again in the week(s) before the election, and immediately after it. It’s important for managers to gather information on issues as they evolve because in elections especially, “October surprises” may cause heightened emotions and stress.

Taking the time to collect information repeatedly and systematically about the way issues are impacting employees might seem onerous. But if we consider the fallout that can come from misunderstanding the emotional weight employees are experiencing — whether it’s from personal feelings about politics or more the public ways that politics can play out in workplaces, including employee walkouts and consumer boycotts — investing the energy and time into understanding the state of employee discord might be a bargain.

Step 2: The Organization Helps All Employees Develop Civil Discourse Skills

When disruptions are occurring, or when they are anticipated to occur, it’s in an organization’s interest to establish (and train employees on) a process for having constructive dialogue. Some organizations set up ground rules. Intuit, for example, established guardrails for discussing sensitive topics on company message boards: “Focus on how you’re feeling and how things are affecting you as a person, and less on using our internal channels as a platform for your political views,” is how one executive described it. Other organizations are initiating training. Hays, an international recruiting firm, established an eight-week program about civil discourse for employees at a time of polarization over discussion of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Society for Human Resource Management offers similar workshops for corporations. However, such efforts are sparse.

Fortunately, there are myriad resources that organizations can explore and adapt to their own cultures and industries. For example, The Better Arguments Project, which has partnered with Allstate, encourages individuals to understand the historical context of issues and why people take the positions they do. Its training helps individuals develop emotional regulation and self-management techniques to better engage in productive conversations. The Civil Conversations Project, which offers similar training focused on racial issues in particular, has been utilized by the Aspen Skiing Company and the U.S. Forest Service. Such activities build on decades of research showing that literally “moving together” — like taking a walk side by side, as Peter Coleman advocates in his 2021 book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization — can increase understanding. The implication is that in addition to instituting behavioral training to develop employee skills in having and facilitating difficult conversations, organizations might also need to consider providing opportunities to have these conversations while mutually engaging in physical activities with coworkers.

Step 3: Everyone Learns and Updates While Embracing Complexity

Psychological research has uncovered complexity’s usefulness as a core antidote to the simplifying dynamics inherent in polarization. Once we view an issue as more complex than we first thought, it can open the door to viewing others more fully. That is, we see people we disagree with not simply as a representative of the moral tribe we’re fighting against but as someone who might share our values in other facets of life. These commonalities become the bedrock for future conversations and cooperation. The more individuals are made to think through different (often conflicting or ambiguous) aspects of an issue, the less likely they are to jump to conclusions.

To facilitate this progression, organizations can offer managers training on conflict resolution, as well as access to a professional mediator and opportunities for facilitated dialogues led by trained facilitators.

However, complexity is not the end goal. Developing a more complex understanding of the subject will also require leaders to learn and update. To continually evolve their employees’ understanding of hot-topic issues and help them adapt their responses, organizations can make use of frameworks such as the after action report template, which was developed for the U.S. military and is now commonly used in business. It’s a tool to analyze the response to an event, crisis, or incident and “correct deficiencies, sustain strengths, and focus on performance of specific mission essential tasks.” The structure helps employees evaluate how an event went, what went well, and how it could be improved. Within the context of managing polarization, leaders could consider adopting a similar approach to situations employees have experienced as emotionally searing.

Discussions about politics at work are not going away, nor are their effects. Think back to that statistic we mentioned at the beginning, about the hundreds of millions of uncivil acts that swirl through our offices, factories, stores, and other workplaces every day.

But such outcomes are not inevitable. Although organizations cannot change how their employees think, they can provide structured processes to influence how their employees act. We hope our guidance here offers a road map for having civil discussions and reducing polarization at work.

“The MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management.”