Political polarization is widening stakeholder divides throughout society, including in government, the news media, and business. Although polarization is recognized as an important phenomenon that firms and their leaders are strategically navigating daily, we know little about the effects of polarization on how stakeholders relate to and engage with firms. In this dissertation, I integrate theory of stakeholder-specific social evaluations with insights about political polarization to study the antecedents, prevalence, and effects of what I call politically-valenced social approval, or social approval that varies across political lines. In the first chapter, I theorize about how firm- and partisan media outlet-level strategies impact news coverage of firms and potentially contribute to stakeholders’ divergent social approval of firms. I present a typology that adapts established measures of celebrity and infamy to represent social approval from the perspective of stakeholders with different political ideologies, introduce the data and measures I developed to empirically represent these constructs, and present the results of descriptive analyses. The second chapter shifts focus to the CEO level and explores a potential antecedent of politically-valenced CEO social approval. Specifically, we study the effects of CEO sociopolitical activism on stakeholders’ social approval of CEOs and find that engaging in activism significantly increases the likelihood a CEO develops politically-valenced social approval. In the third chapter, we return to the firm-level and study the consequences ofpolitically-valenced social approval on nonmarket performance in a highly politically polarized context: the U.S. federal government. We analyze the effects of politically-valenced social approval on three nonmarket performance outcomes and find mixed results of the effects of these forms of social approval on a firm’s ability to access, inform and transact with nonmarket actors. This dissertation contributes theoretically and empirically to the social evaluations, upper echelons, and nonmarket strategy literatures by unpacking how polarization influences stakeholders’ perceptions of firms or CEOs, when polarized perceptions are more likely to occur, and what performance benefits and harms may result from more or less polarized approval.