Passion at Work

The popular press is replete with stories emphasizing the importance of having passion for work, together with advice on how employees and their managers can develop work passion. However, systematic research on work passion did not occur until the early 2000s, when scholars built on seminal work by Robert Vallerand to examine passion in the workplace, the outcomes of work passion, and factors that drive such passion. Passion, defined as a strong inclination toward an activity that people like and find important, can extend to one’s work and encompasses three elements: affective, cognitive, and behavioral. The affective element captures the strong, intense liking for and enjoyment of work, while the cognitive element captures the importance or significance of work to the individual’s life, such that ...