By Scott Morrison, UC Berkeley Haas
Few workers face more scrutiny than professional athletes. Every movement is measured, every outcome quantified, and every performance evaluated against objective standards. So when UC Berkeley Haas researcher Tim Sels wondered how America's deepening political polarization was affecting workers' performance, he turned to one of the most comprehensive data sets on individual human performance: the PGA Tour.
What he discovered on golf courses—where random assignments and precise metrics make the invisible visible—was that professional golfers perform significantly worse when randomly grouped with competitors holding opposing political views. Even more striking, this performance gap nearly triples during periods of heightened national political polarization—and it translates directly into lower winnings.
The implications of his study, co-authored by Balázs Kovács of Yale School of Management, extend far beyond the fairway. The same dynamic may be undermining productivity in open-plan offices, on trading floors, in sales teams, and anywhere workers find themselves in close proximity with colleagues holding opposing political views.
"Political differences can create a more stressful and less psychologically safe environment, reducing focus and leading to reduced individual performance," explains Tim Sels, a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and lead author of the study published in Management Science .
"Political differences can create a more stressful and less psychologically safe environment, reducing focus and leading to reduced individual performance."
—Tim Sels, postdoctoral researcher, UC Berkeley Haas
Random team assignments
The study, conducted by Sels and Balázs Kovács of Yale University's School of Management, analyzed over 25,000 player-tournament-rounds from more than 700 PGA Tour tournaments between 1997 and 2022. The researchers painstakingly identified the political affiliations of 360 players—82 Democrats and 278 Republicans—through voter registration records, campaign donations, social media activity, and public statements. They then examined how these golfers performed when randomly assigned to play alongside political allies versus opponents during the first two rounds of tournaments.
The advantage of the PGA Tour as a research setting lies in its randomization. Unlike most workplace situations where people self-select into teams or are deliberately paired, PGA Tour officials use a computer program to randomly assign golfers to groups for the opening rounds. This random assignment provides the scientific gold standard for establishing causal relationships—a rare find in social science research.
The performance gaps were striking and economically meaningful. Golfers playing in politically mixed groups scored 0.2 strokes worse per round, ranked approximately 2.5 positions poorer, and faced a 5.3% reduced probability of making the tournament cut—the critical threshold separating those who earn prize money from those who go home empty-handed. These performance differences translated into a financial loss of approximately $13,000 to $23,400 in each of the PGA's 47 tournaments, in which prize pools typically range from $10 million to $20 million.
"In professional sports, tiny differences in performance can make a huge difference in rankings or earnings," says Sels.
Psychological tension
The study's most revealing findings came from examining when these performance gaps emerged. Using detailed shot-level data, Sels and Kovács discovered that being in a politically mixed group primarily affected performance during driving and putting, moments when golfers stand closest to their playing partners. During the "approach to the green" and "around the green" stages, when players are more dispersed across the course, the political composition of the group had no significant effect.
This proximity pattern points to the underlying mechanism: anxiety triggered by the mere presence of political opponents. "We're not talking about heated political debates on the course," Sels emphasizes. "Professional golfers maintain silence during shots. But simply being aware of politically different others in shared spaces creates psychological tension that disrupts performance."
"Professional golfers maintain silence during shots. But simply being aware of politically different others in shared spaces creates psychological tension that disrupts performance."
—Tim Sels
Higher polarization boosts performance gap
Sels and Kovács also found that this tension waxes and wanes with the national political climate. During periods of high polarization, measured by the Partisan Conflict Index tracking political disagreement among U.S. politicians in major newspapers, the performance gap nearly tripled to 0.55 strokes per round. During calmer political periods, the gap virtually disappeared, dropping to just 0.02 strokes.
The researchers ran an extensive array of tests to rule out other explanations. They controlled for age, race, nationality, language, religion, education, hobbies, and numerous other individual attributes. They tested whether friendship ties, residential proximity, or prior playing history explained the effects (they didn't). They examined whether being a political minority in the group mattered (it didn't). And still, the core finding remained: political heterogeneity impairs performance primarily through proximity-based anxiety.
Workplace implications
What's happening on the golf course is likely happening in other workplaces, too. The study identifies specific workplace conditions where political differences are most likely to harm individual performance: when political ideology is noticeable, when colleagues' political views are known, when people work in close physical proximity, and when individual performance is tracked and rewarded. Open-plan offices, trading floors, sales environments with side-by-side representatives, and collaborative workspaces all fit this profile.
Numerous studies have examined how demographic diversity affects team outcomes, with mixed findings about when it helps or harms performance. But political heterogeneity has remained understudied—despite the fact that recent surveys show more than a quarter of U.S. workers discuss politics with colleagues, with in-person workers (30%) more likely to engage in such discussions than hybrid (24%) or remote workers (19%).
"Political affiliation signals shared values and beliefs more directly than demographics," Kovács notes. "It creates in-groups and out-groups that influence psychological security even without explicit interaction."
"Political affiliation signals shared values and beliefs more directly than demographics. It creates in-groups and out-groups that influence psychological security even without explicit interaction."
—Balázs Kovács, Yale School of Management
Practical solutions
Importantly, the researchers caution against simplistic solutions. "We're not advocating for organizational homogeneity," Sels stresses. "Diversity can be very beneficial when you're being creative." Instead, they suggest practical solutions such as:
- giving workers more space during politically charged periods.
- enhancing psychological safety through inclusive practices
- encouraging diversity in creative areas while giving people room to work independently when the work demands concentration.
Unfortunately, political polarization remains high—the Partisan Conflict Index has trended sharply upward since the early 2000s, with particular spikes during the 2013 government shutdown and following the 2016 Trump-Clinton election. For organizations, that means mounting pressure to address a force that can quietly erode productivity. The PGA Tour findings suggest these divisions have real implications for working Americans, even if the economic toll is harder to quantify. Recognizing these costs is the first step toward managing political differences more effectively.
Read the full paper:
By Tim Sels, UC Berkeley Haas, and Balázs Kovács, Yale School of Management
Management Science
