Table 1. Psychological definitions of passion
'Work passion' is one human capability that contributes most towards the value creation, yet remains untapped in organizational research. In response, we provide an initial conceptualization of 'work passion' construct in Indian context. In doing so, we first reviewed the explicit definitions of passion available in various contexts. In our next step, we conducted personal interviews of 21 individuals from wide range of occupation to understand the meaning of 'work passion' from Indian perspective. At last, after integrating the findings of literature and qualitative analysis of personal interviews, we defined 'work passion' as a psychological state which is characterized by: a) love for one's work experienced through the feeling of joy and vitality at work, b) sense of self-motivation to do one's work, c) seeing one's identity in terms of one's work and d) willingness to learn and improve continuously. This study provides some important directions for future research focused on work passion as well.
The concept of passion at workplace has received good deal of attention from practitioners in the recent past. Work passion is considered vital for organizational success; it is the strongest positive emotion that fuels employee's energy at workplace and without it managers cannot motivate others (Boyatzis, Mckee, Goleman, 2002). Passionate employees are the need of the hour for effectively responding to the ongoing disruptive changes in the business environment. A survey conducted by Deloitte (2010) reveals that passionate workers are twice as likely to be inspired and energized by unexpected challenges as the disengaged workers (Hagel et al, 2010).While the concept of passion at workplace has gained popularity among practitioners, there has been little conceptual or empirical consideration of the nature of 'work passion'.Barring some exceptions(Pertulla, 2004; Zigarmi, 2009), all studies on the concept of passion that have been published till date is either in the context of activities or in the context of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to offer an initial conceptualization of the construct of 'work passion' in Indian context. In doing so, we followed three-phase process. Phase one - we did a review of literature wherein some attempt was made to define the term 'passion' to identify the themes associated with it. Phase two -interviews were conducted to get the opinion of Indian population on what they understand by the term 'passion' in relation to their work. Phase three - based on the inference from previous literature work and data collected from interviews, we came up with an operational definition of 'work passion'. This operational definition formed the basis for our further research on 'work passion'.
Passion has gained lot of attention from researchers of different disciplines since long. History of 'passion' reveals that the meaning of this term has seen a considerable change from something ruinous (Kant, 2006) to something desirable for success(Boyatzis, Mckee, Goleman, 2002). . Similarly, research on this concept has also seen a noticeable change. Earlier the concept was seen associated only with the romantic or interpersonal relationship, but now has gained attention from researchers of different disciplines as well. In this section, we will review the various empirical as well as theoretical studies available in psychological literature where an attempt has been made to define 'passion'. These psychological definitions are summarized in Table 1. Further, the review suggests that passion is studied as a domain-specific motivational construct in psychology and has been operationalized and empirically investigated broadly in three different domains, namely: (A) Passion for activities (sports, music, gambling, dance, etc.), (B) Entrepreneurial passion and (C) Passion for work. The details for each of these 3 domains have been discussed in Figure 1.
Table 1. Psychological definitions of passion
Figure 1. Different domain-specific conceptualizations of passion
Activities play an important part in a person's life apart from academics and work. To pursue an activity life-long, one needs to have a strong liking towards that activity. 'Passion' for an activity acts as a motivational force to practise it for long time. Some of the researches on passion in the domain of activity are discussed below:
“Strong inclination or desire towards a self-defining activity that one likes (or love), finds important and in which one invests time and energy”
They proposed a dualistic model of passion (DMP) comprised of harmonious and obsessive passion, which differ in regard to how autonomously they are integrated into personal identity (in consonance with selfdetermination Deci & Ryan,2000). theory, “Harmonious passion (HP) refers to an autonomous internalization that leads individuals to choose to engage in the activity that they like. On the contrary, Obsessive passion (OP) refers to a controlled internalization of an activity in one's identity that creates an internal pressure to engage in the activity that the person likes”. (Vallerand et al, 2003) .
Result of past researches on DMP indicates that harmonious passion leads to more positive outcomes as compared to obsessive passion. Like harmonious passion is directly related to an individual's overall well-being (Mageau et al., 2005; Philippe et al, 2009; Vallerand et al., 2003), it is also associated with pleasant experience and positive influence (Vallerand et al., 2006; Vallerand et al., 2008; Mageau& Vallerand et al., 2007). While obsessive passion may possibly make an individual dependent on their task or engagement (Vallerand et al., 2003), it is directly related to negative emotions, thoughts and experiences (Vallerand et al., 2008, Philippe et al., 2010), conflicts in different spheres of life and reduced functionality to carry out routine activities(Vallerand et al., 2003), . It makes an individual rigid, stubborn, and highly inflexible(Rip, Fortin & Vallerand, 2006).
Passion is characterized as “(a) wanting to do the activity all the time and devoting significant time and energy to it, (b) getting completely involved in the activity and experiencing flow, (c) getting emotional release from the activity, and (d) seeing one's identity in terms of the activity.”
In their qualitative study, they conducted interviews with two different samples of school going adolescents categorized as 'talented' for non-academic activities (e.g. dancing or sports) and adolescents who were categorized as 'gifted' for performing well in academic activities. The adolescents were asked to express their views on the above mentioned criterias of passion. The result of this study found that passion is a state and is more a characteristic of non-academic than academic achievement activities. Result of this study also suggested that typical school-type settings or environment undermine passion, whereas peer and teacher support act as an important reinforcer of passion (Fredricks, et,al. 2010). This conceptualization of passion lacks empirical study.
Moeller (2013), integrated short term motivational intensity and long-term commitment to define concept of passion for activities and came up with a new commitment and passion (com.pass) model. This model suggests that the concept of commitment and passion share commonalities with respect to the three components intentions, identification and long-term goals. According to them, passion differs from commitment only in the way that it describes the coincidence of commitment with desire. They defined desire as intense approach motivation to engage in an activity accompanied by the experience of high arousal affects and is related to goal pursuit.
The concept of 'passion' is gaining popularity in entrepreneurial literature as well. Cited researches reveal that entrepreneurial passion leads to venture growth. Some relevant researches on the concept are listed below:
Definition: “love for one's work”.
Past empirical studies on this concept found a significant relationship between entrepreneurial passion and venture growth mediated by the role of individual behavior like motivation, goals and self-efficacy(Baum et al., 2001 and Baum and Locke, 2004). Although their work has provided some initial insight, it has certain issues. First, this conceptualization of passion has considered it as a trait which is in contrast with the recent conceptualization of passion as state that can vary with the change in factors affecting it. Secondly, this definition covers only the emotional component of passion in terms of loving ones work.
Definition: “Consciously accessible intense positive feelings experienced by engagement in entrepreneurial activities associated with roles that are meaningful and salient to the self-identity of the entrepreneur”.
Majority of literature in entrepreneurship defined passion as “love” for one's work(Shane et al, 2003, Baum and Locke, 2004). The most comprehensive definition of entrepreneurial passion till date is given by Cardon et al, 2009. They integrated the emotional and motivational component of passion into single construct, where “intense feeling positive feelings” captures the emotional aspect of their definition and “roles that are meaningful to self-identity of the entrepreneur” represents cognitive aspect of the definition. According to Cardon (2009), there can be three different types of passion experienced by entrepreneurs -passion for inventing, passion for founding, or passion for developing.
Findings of various studies on this conceptualization suggest that passion for founding and developing is related to venture growth(Drnovsek, et al., 2010). Passion for inventing and developing leads to creativity in goal pursuit and greater persistence and there exist a high correlation between all the three types of passion and selfefficacy (Cardon and Kirk, 2010).
While the concept of passion has received a good deal of attention in social psychology, the majority of research pertaining to passion are outside the context of work. Until recently the concepts like “work passion” (Perttulla, 2004) and “employee work passion” (Zigarmi, 2009) emerged and provided some important insight with respect to passion for one's work.
Definition: “Psychological state characterized by the experience of intense positive emotions, an internal drive to work, and a sense of meaningful connection towards one's work”
This definition has two aspects of passion—cognitive aspect (meaningful connection and internal drive) and emotional aspect (joy and subjective vitality). Meaningful connection refers to 'how an individual's identity is intertwined with their work'. An intense inner drive that propels individuals in their work reflects the second dimension of work passion. The emotional aspect deals with the joy dimension of work passion that caters to feelings of enjoyment, happiness and love towards work. On the other hand, subjective vitality refers to a feeling of energy and aliveness at work(Ryan and Frederick, 1997). Above, conceptualization of passion for work considers it as a state that can be influenced by the external forces such as autonomy at work place, perceived organizational support and self-esteem (Perttula, 2004). Passion for work has been found to be associated with variety of positive outcomes, such as, lower level of burnout, greater employee creativity, and effectiveness (Perttulla, 2010). This conceptualization of passion for work contains limited studies and need further exploration.
Definition: “An individual's persistent, emotionally positive, meaning-based, state of well-being stemming from reoccurring cognitive and affective appraisals of various job and organizational situations that result in consistent, constructive work intentions and behaviours”.
Zigarmi et al. (2009) opined that a person becomes passionate about the work he or she does through a mental process. They proposed an employee work passion model where they suggested that passion is a result of how an individual appraises the environment in which one works resulting into constructive work behaviour. According to Zigarmi (2011), employee work passion is made up of four elements- cognitive perceptions, affective inferences, well-being states and work intentions. This conceptualisation of passion focuses more on how passion can be developed and fostered and what are its behavioural outcomes rather than on what is passion. It captures one's attitude towards organisational and job characteristics rather than how individual thinks or feels about his or her work in terms of work internalization and sense of identity. Past researches on passion do not align with this definition and suggest that - passion is love for his or her work irrespective of the nature of environment in which one works.
From above studies on passion in different domains, some common components have been identified by us that formed the basis of our research. A review of various schools of thought on the concept of passion revealed that the common essence of these views is that passion encompasses emotional, cognitive and behavioural aspects (Table 2).
Table 2. Dimensions of passion
To ensure that the dimensions identified from the literature do match with the personal opinion of Indian population on the conceptualization of work passion, the authors conducted some semi-structured personal interviews. Interviews of 21 individuals were conducted from a wide range of occupation, industry and organizational levels to secure broad conceptualization of work passion. Individuals were asked to answer the following questions -
(1) what does work passion means to you?.
(2) How do you come to know that a person is passionate?
(3) Do you think that everybody can be passionate for their work? Why or why not?
(4)Work environment can change the level of passion in an individual? What are those factors?
(5) If possible for you, please share an event when you experienced passion for your work. What did you feel at that time and what was the outcome of your passion?.
As people were finding it difficult to define, explain or describe the construct, the authors asked them to recall and describe a time when they had experienced passion at work. In contrast to their inability to provide a clear definition of the construct, the“interviewees” were able to provide rich descriptions of their experience of passion at work.
Based on the qualitative analysis of these interviews, the authors suggest that work passion is distinct state that is characterized by emotional, cognitive and behavioural dimensions (Table 3). Most individuals describe the experience as including: a feeling of intense positive emotions characterized by a feeling of joy and vitality; cognitive dimension characterized by a sense of selfmotivation to do one's work and a belief that their work is their identity and a behavioural dimension characterized by one's willingness to learn and improve continuously. The details of each dimension of work passion are discussed in detail below (phase three section).
Table 3. Dimensions of 'work passion'
After integrating the findings from literature and qualitative analysis of interviews, the authors identified five dimensions of work passion- intense positive emotions, vitality, sense of self-motivation to do one's work, seeing one's identity in terms of one's work and willingness to learn and improve continuously (Figure 2). The first four dimensions identified from our interviews are consistent with literature, but our last dimension which is capturing the behavioural aspect of work passion is exclusively the result of our interviews. These five dimensions are discussed in detail below:
Figure 2. Construct of 'work passion'
The result of literature review and interview revealed that the most dominating theme associated with passion is feeling of intense positive emotions. Passionate individuals love their work, enjoy it and feel enthusiastic and energetic at work. Earlier in psychology, the term 'love'has its association with the definition of personal relationships only, but now it has been used by various researchers to define the concept of passion as well (Vallerand, et,al, 2003; Baum & Locke, 2004; Perttulla, 2004, Gubman, 2004). The same was supported by our interviews, where interviewees were found to be in love with their work. For example, a Professor noted that
“I love teaching, because of the way I conduct my classes....not a bad comment to receive on my 11th year of teaching, especially because of my recent 77th birthday, which I spent....teaching, of course!!”
Another positive emotion that emerged from literature review and interview was joy. Passionate individuals enjoy their work as they are in deep love with their work. Past literature suggests that 'joy' is often used interchangeably with 'happiness' (Lazarus, 1991). The characteristics of “joy” as one of the positive emotions have been discussed in the work of Fredrickson (1998). Recently, Perttulla (2004) has studied joy as one of the dimensions of passion for one's work.
Individuals who were interviewed defined being passionate for their work as “enjoying the stuff you work upon” and “enjoying every moment at work”. Another person defined passion as “amount of love and enjoyment one derives from his or her work.”
Feeling enthusiastic and energetic at work emerged out as one of the positive feelings associated with passion. According to Smilor (1997) passion is enthusiasm, joy and even zeal that come from the energetic and unflagging pursuit of a worthy, challenging and uplifting purpose. It is similar to the concept of 'subjective vitality' noted by Perttulla (2004) as one of the dimensions of work passion. Ryan & Frederick (1997) defined subjective vitality as the subjective experience of being full of energy and alive. Further he defined vitality as “energy that is perceived to emanate from self”. As people having passion for their work tend to work for the pleasure, happiness or joy they get from their work, feel energetic from inside rather than due to external forces. Our interview also supported this argument. The individuals defined passion as “When people look forward to doing their work with their soul and heart, it is passion. Passion is the overriding emotion blacking out other considerations, such as money, appreciation or rewards”. Others defined it as “when you want to go to work every morning that you like what you do and time seems to fly fast when you work” and “the fear of Monday morning and the joy of the Friday afternoon do not exist”.
Another dimension that has emerged from the literature and interview is, feeling self-motivated to do one's work. It is similar to the notion of inner drive of Perttulla's conceptualization of work passion. She defined the concept of inner drive as, intense internal drive that propels individuals in their work. Few of the practitioners have also supported the notion of self- motivation in literature. Like Chang (2000) defined passion as “personal intensity, or the force that fuels our strongest emotion”, similarly, Hagel said that passion is “an intrinsic drive to do more and excel at every aspect of one's profession”. This dimension also got support from the personal interviews conducted by us. Where the interviewees defined passion as “being self-motivated towards work” and “doing one's work without feeling external pressures”, another individual stated that “passion is the overriding emotion blacking out other considerations, such as money, appreciation or rewards”. Third person said that passion means “self-belief in being able to get what is desired, you need nobody to motivate you to do your work”.
Passionate individuals need no one to motivate them and their actions are not guided by the external rewards, rather they have an internal drive to do their work.
The review of literature and interviews conducted by us suggests that passionate individuals see their work as identity meaningful for them. Their work is their identity. Vallerand (2003) has noted the importance of activity internalization or activity valuation in his conceptualization of passion. He proposed that feeling harmoniously passionate for an activity comes from an autonomous internalization of the activity into the person's identity. Recently, passion has been defined as “seeing one's identity in terms of activity” and “identification with activity” (Fredricks, Alfeld, & Eccles, 2010, Moeller, 2013). According to Perttulla (2004), work passion is felt by a person when he seems to have a sense of purpose in what he does and has a sense of meaningful connection with his work. Similarly, Cardon (2009) stated that “passion involves intense positive feeling directed towards activities and roles that are meaningful to self-identity of the entrepreneur”. This dimension got support from the interviews conducted by us where interviewees stated that passion connotes “a sense of belongingness with work more than to the organization” and “feeling a personal sense of pride doing that work”.
This dimension has emerged from the result of interviews conducted by us and has not been captured in literature. Almost all the interviewees somewhere reflected the behavioral aspect of passion in terms of “continuous learning and improvement to give their best”. One of the interviewees, who is a teacher, stated that for her, work passion means “to take up new challenging projects or do something new that would create a sense of "Aha" moments in my class room as I am a teacher working with kids across the board. Passion makes me to think for newer ideas and to improve the quality of teaching learning process”
The concept of learning is not new to the academic literature. In general, learning refers to the sense that one is acquiring, and can apply, knowledge and skills(Dweck, 1986, Elliot & Dweck, 1988). This dimension of passion depicts its behavioral aspect. The behavioral component has not been ignored by researchers in the past. In the work of Vallerand (2003), the behavioral component has been reflected by the concept of investment of time and energy. Similarly, Fredricks, et,al. (2010), defined passion as wanting to do the activity all the time and devoting significant time and energy to it. Both the works stated here talk about passion for an activity more specifically, but in organizational settings, the behavioral concept of passion has not been captured till date. In their conceptualization of passion, both Perttulla and Cardon focused on its emotional and cognitive aspects, but we cannot ignore the behavioral aspect of passion. In the work of Spreitzer et al, 2005 it was found that both sense of vitality (aliveness) and sense of learning cannot be separated from each other. To feel energy and aliveness at work, one needs to make continuous efforts to improve his or her skills and vice-versa.
Based upon the deliberations, the authors provide a new definition of passion. In defining 'work passion', they first provide an explicit and concise definition of passion and then define 'work passion' as a state rather than a stable trait.
Definition - Work passion is a psychological state characterized by: a) love for one's work experienced through the feeling of joy and vitality at work, b) sense of self-motivation to do one's work, c) seeing one's identity in terms of one's work and d) willingness to learn and improve continuously.
Passion as a state rather than a trait:
Prior researches reveal that passion has been studied as a stable trait by some researchers (Csikszentmihalyi, (1996); Florida (2002) (see Table 4). Although these studies do not define passion explicitly but considers it as a stable trait or developed personal interest with intense positive feelings, it is assumed to be a form of motivation that leads to learning, achievement and enhanced creativity. Similarly, in entrepreneurial literature, 'passion' has been considered as one of the essential traits of an entrepreneur for starting a new venture, to overcome challenges and for venture growth (Smilor, 1997; Baum et al, 2001).
Table 4. Passion as a trait or state
But recently, passion is studied as a state rather than a trait which can be developed and fostered (Pertulla, 2004; Cardon, 2009; Fredricks et al., 2010; Moller & Grassinger, 2013). Pertulla (2004) studied self-esteem, perceived organizational support and autonomy at workplace as some of the factors affecting work passion. Moreover, the result of a qualitative study by Fredricks et al, (2010) on how to develop and foster passion for learning reveals that passion is a state and is more a characteristic of nonacademic than academic achievement activities. This study reveals that typical school-type settings or environment undermine passion, whereas peer and teacher support acts as an important re-inforcer of passion.
So, we consider work passion as a state rather than a trait which can be developed and fostered. This view got support from our interviews where almost all the interviewees agreed on the statement that passion gets affected by the working environment. The interviewees also suggested some of the factors (summarized in Table 5), the absence and presence of which can influence the level of passion in an employee.
Table 5. Factors affecting work passion
Despite 'work passion' being a critical factor in employeeorganizational growth, we still do not have enough knowledge to evaluate it in quantifiable terms in Indian context. This is because, from Indian perspective we don't know what it means, what its dimensions are and what it leads to. Thus, in this qualitative study, we made an initial attempt to conceptualize work passion in Indian context. We believe that our research-derived definition is consistent with the conceptual definitions of others (Perttula, 2004), but more clearly describes the nature of the individual experience of passion at work in Indian context. Apart from emotional and cognitive component of passion, our qualitative analysis suggested that passion is also reflected through behavioural component. So, this conceptualization of 'work passion' can form a base to quantify 'work passion' by developing a measurement scale for the same. To our knowledge, no present measurement scale is capturing all the three aspects of work passion(emotion, cognition, behaviour) originated from our qualitative study. Prior researches suggest that there are only two scales available to measure work passion - passion scale (Vallerand, 2003) and work passion scale(Perttulla, 2010). Where, Vallerand's scale focuses on the measurement of two types of passion- Harmonious and Obsessive work passion rather than passion in isolation. On the contrary, Pertulla's scale focuses on passion itself rather than its types. But, this scale does not capture the behavioural dimension and moreover both the scales have not been used in Indian context yet, which leaves a scope for developing a measurement scale for work passion.
Secondly, as passion has now been recognized as a state in nature suggesting that it can be developed and fostered by providing the encouraging environment to employees at workplace, future researches can focus on the identification of various factors that undermine or enhance work passion at organisation. Few attempts have been made earlier to identify antecedents of passion and our qualitative study also provides a list of various organisational and job factors that affect the level of passion in employees (see Table6). This calls for the empirical investigation of the relationship between these factors and their effect on work passion at workplace in India.
Another research implication for future lies in the exploration of various outcomes of work passion. Result of past research on work passion reveals that employee passion leads to increased effectiveness and lower level of burnout (Perttulla, 2004). Work passion being a positive emotion is capable of producing various positive outcomes such as, lower turnover, lower absenteeism, organisational citizenship behaviour, career satisfaction etc. Future studies can focus on the positive as well as negative outcomes of passion.