The post‑pandemic era has witnessed that office politics has become increasingly concealed and digitalized under remote‑work arrangements, imposing substantial impacts on employees’ psychological states and behavioral responses. Grounded in the cognitive appraisal theory of stress, this study constructs a moderated‑mediation model to explore how perceived office politics evokes work withdrawal behaviors among remote employees. Questionnaire data were collected from 412 remote employees, and hypotheses were tested via hierarchical regression and bootstrapping approaches. Results show that perceived office politics positively predicts emotional exhaustion and work‑withdrawal behaviors. Emotional exhaustion fully mediates the association between perceived office politics and work withdrawal. Furthermore, remote‑work frequency positively moderates the link between perceived office politics and emotional exhaustion, such that this relationship is stronger for employees engaging in high‑frequency remote work. Our findings indicate that, although digital work settings reduce face‑to‑face interpersonal conflicts, information asymmetry in distributed teams may amplify stress‑related psychological costs and trigger employees’ “invisible withdrawal”. This study offers empirical evidence for understanding the psychological consequences of transformed workplace politics in modern organizations and yields practical implications for organizational intervention in remote and hybrid contexts.