With the current rise in polarization, politics-based stress (PS) has become a pervasive issue in all work environments, leading to conflict, disrupting work relationships, and directly impacting organizationally relevant outcomes. To gain a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon, we explored the role of worker perspective-taking (PT) in mitigating the potentially adverse effects of PS on impactful work outcomes. Our research, which adopts a competing hypotheses approach, suggests that PT can either neutralize or amplify the adverse effects of PS on work outcomes. Our study of 342 employee-supervisor dyads revealed that heightened levels of PT exacerbated PS’s harmful effects on employee-rated outcomes (i.e., emotional exhaustion and turnover intent), confirming an amplifying effect. Furthermore, we found that supervisor-rated work performance declined for low PT workers as political stress increased, while the relationship between PS and work performance remained unchanged for high PT employees. These findings underscore the need for further research in this area, and we discuss the limitations and potential future research directions in our conclusion.
