A growing number of companies are seeking out employees whose passion for their work is the driving force behind their performance, and they’re investing in strategies to encourage and nurture this motivation. The research on this topic is clear — more passionate employees are more productive, innovative, and collaborative, and they demonstrate higher levels of commitment to their organizations. Fostering passion is a winning strategy for organizations that aspire to achieve sustained growth, innovation, and success.
However, in the pursuit of nurturing passion, recent researchreveals that employers may have overlooked and neglected the needs of employees driven by other sources of motivation, such as financial stability, social status, or familial obligations. These employees play a critical role in the success of their companies, but may be subject to an invisible penalty due to their perceived lack of passion for their work.
The research involving 1,245 full-time employees across several organizations that varied in size and industry revealed a novel phenomenon in the contemporary workplace: The more people love their work, the more they see it as a moral imperative. Employees who were more passionate about their work agreed more strongly with sentences like “Working for personal enjoyment is morally virtuous” and “Being intrinsically motivated is moral.” For these individuals, loving their work had moral significance beyond personal fulfillment, and they were more likely to judge their colleagues’ work motivations against their own moral yardstick or ask, “Are my colleagues here for the right reasons?”
To read the full story from Harvard Business Review, click here.
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