Partisan prejudice and workplace communication: An empirical roadmap

Political polarization, particularly in its affective form, increasingly shapes how individuals perceive, interact, and collaborate in organizations. This essay argues that partisan prejudice—a growing affective divide between supporters of opposing parties—has become an underexamined but consequential force in workplace communication. We outline an empirical roadmap for advancing research at this intersection. First, we call for descriptive work documenting how polarization manifests in organizations, including inequalities in political expression and the emergence of partisan signaling in daily interactions. Second, we highlight the need to examine how polarization influences workplace communication, from dyadic exchanges to organizational networks, using diverse methodological approaches such as surveys, experiments, and computational analyses. Finally, we encourage research that reverses the causal arrow by investigating how workplace communication might mitigate or exacerbate polarization, considering factors such as leadership communication, virtual collaboration, and diversity initiatives. By integrating theories of polarization and organizational communication, this framework aims to guide systematic inquiry into how political divisions are reproduced—or potentially repaired—through the communicative fabric of work.