A Different Kind of Wedge Issue: What Golf Reveals About Working Across Ideological Lines

If you wanted to understand how political polarization affects the workplace, you probably wouldn’t start by looking at professional golfers. But it turns out that the sport provides a powerful opportunity to examine this question because it has an element of chance that is not typical of office jobs: on the PGA Tour, players are randomly assigned to tee pairings. If a Democrat and Republican had to play side by side, Prof. Balázs Kovács and former research fellow Tim Sels wondered, did the golfers’ performance suffer?

Researchers need to investigate these questions further because politics is becoming an increasingly stronger force in society, Kovács says. Hot-button issues are seeping into numerous industries, whether it’s the effect of tariffs on a business’s imports or whether a teacher can talk about nonbinary people. Polarization has become so intense that “there’s no way it’s not going to affect how people work,” he says.

In their new study, Kovács and Sels, now at the University of California, Berkeley, found that golfers who played with people of the opposite political orientation scored an average of about 0.2 strokes worse. That might not seem like much, but it could mean up to tens of thousands of dollars of lost winnings per tournament.

It seems likely that a similar dynamic might arise in traditional office workplaces too, Kovács says. After all, these golfers “are really professional,” he says. “They should be able to shut off everything else in the outside world and just do their job.” And they don’t even have to talk to each other.

Plenty of studies have been done on how other types of diversity—across race, nationality, gender, and age—affect work performance. But researchers haven’t looked as closely at political differences. And the few studies so far have produced contradictory results; some suggest that having politically mixed groups benefits team performance, while others indicate that it’s detrimental.

Sels came up with the idea of using golf data to tackle the question while he was an international fellow at Yale SOM. The fact that the PGA Tour group assignments were random was critical; it meant that the researchers could conclude more strongly that the political differences caused any changes in scores. In this case, because of the nature of the game, the team would measure individual rather than group performance.

To investigate, Sels and Kovács gathered data on the PGA Tour’s near-weekly tournaments from 1997 to 2022. For each tournament, golfers were assigned to groups of two or three. They then filtered out non-Americans and tried to determine the U.S. players’ political orientations, based on sources such as social media accounts, donations, magazine interviews, and voter registration records. They classified 278 golfers as Republicans and 82 as Democrats.

Next, the team compared the performance of homogeneous groups, in which all players had the same political leanings, to mixed groups containing at least one Democrat and one Republican. They found that the golfers in mixed groups took an average of 0.2 more strokes to complete a round, even after controlling for factors such as age, race, and the quality of the individual player and the overall group.

The researchers also examined whether the results changed depending on how polarized the country was at the time. To measure polarization for each month, they used an index that tracked political conflict based on newspaper reports.

During the least polarized period, the performance gap for mixed groups nearly vanished. But during the most politically tense period, it rose to 0.55 strokes.

Kovács and Sels also wondered if physical proximity made a difference. Players stand close together at the beginning while teeing off, as well as at the end while putting on the green. In between, when they’re playing on the fairway, the rough, and around the green, they’re usually farther apart.

Performance suffered more during periods of close proximity, the researchers found. In politically mixed groups, players’ chances of their tee shot landing on the fairway dropped by half a percentage point, and they took an average of 0.1 more strokes on the putting green.

Why does this happen when the players aren’t even working together as a team? Kovács speculates that they might feel anxiety during those close moments. While the golfers generally don’t chat much during the game, they spend a lot of time together on the year-long tour—staying in the same hotels, sharing meals, and so on—and are probably familiar with each other’s political predilections. Even if they’re not debating the merits of the president’s policies on the green, the mere presence of someone who disagrees with them could throw off their focus.

Finally, the team calculated the economic fallout of this loss of focus. The total pot for a tournament is usually about $10 to $20 million, split among players. A difference of 0.2 strokes translated to a significant sum—on average, a loss of $13,000 to $23,400 per tournament.

The study suggests that political differences do influence people’s ability to execute their work, Kovács says. “These things matter even if you don’t talk.” And with polarization on the rise, “it’s getting worse.”

Of course, people have always had to deal with coworkers they didn’t have much in common with. But “if I don’t like someone because they like chocolate ice cream and I like vanilla ice cream,” that’s different than if “they are pro-choice and I’m pro-life,” Kovács says. “That’s harder to reconcile.”

And it’s difficult to escape politics in an era of hyper-polarization. Even if managers declare that political talk is off-limits in the workplace, that policy in itself could be fraught. “For a lot of people, it might be problematic that a company doesn’t take a stance on certain issues,” he says. “Every decision is political.”