Should We Talk About the Government? Politicized News and Employee Affective Well-Being

Abstract

Breaking news often elicits emotions. In an increasingly crisis-ridden and fractured society, we propose politicized news can cause employees’ state affect to diverge along ideological lines. Integrating theory on social sharing of emotions with evidence from political science and related disciplines, we explore the proximate workplace consequences of politicized events external to the organization. Our novel methodological approach incorporates national level events in conjunction with experience sampling methodology that assesses within-person change; 132 employees in the United States were surveyed over fifteen working days surrounding the highly contentious 2020 election. Questions did not reference the election, yet results indicate significant changes in state positive and negative affect that varied according to political orientation and corresponded to daily lead news. Although many organizations discourage discussion of political or societal issues due to fear of conflict, our results challenge this conventional understanding. We find apparent affective benefits from an observed increase in coworker communication linked to emotionally-charged politicized news. These results are the first to show meaningful divergent effects of external events for a broad cross-section of employees in real time, and highlight the need for management research to address societal factors as relevant to employee well-being.