ABSTRACT
Passion for work has become increasingly valued, as reflected by its ubiquity in popular and empirical discourse. Yet we lack scientific consensus on the definition of work passion, and a reliable, well-validated measure of work passion that is relevant to workers across various vocations. In this paper, we identified and integrated key themes from existing scientific conceptualizations into a precise definition: Passion for work means to strongly identify with a line of work that one feels motivated to engage in and derives positive affect from doing. We developed a 10-item Work Passion (WP) scale, which we tested across multiple studies with a total of 858 adults, including working adults from two different English-speaking cultural backgrounds (i.e., United States and Singapore), and a two-wave study of employees from various vocations. Our results showed that work passion is associated with a host of beneficial outcomes, including greater career commitment, lower levels of job burnout, less work-home conflict, and fewer physical symptoms. Our research (1) provides an integrated definition of work passion, (2) offers a reliable, cross-culturally tested scale, and (3) highlights important implications for work outcomes associated with being passionate towards one’s line of work.
Author contributions
Chen conceived the idea and carried out the data collection. Chen conducted the analyses with assistance from Lee and feedback from Lim. Chen wrote the manuscript, with input from Lee and Lim.
Acknowedgement
We are immensely grateful to Ryan Y. Hong for his guidance, and to Qiao Kang Teo and Delphinna Neo Hui Xuan for their assistance with this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The Passion Towards Work Scale and Entrepreneurial Passion measure are the two most popular measures of work-directed passion to date. As an aside, there have also been other attempts to measure work passion, which either involved less validation efforts or which remain unpublished. These include Baum and Locke (Citation2004) 5-item trait “passion for work” scale, which has not undergone rigorous scale validation, and Perttula’s unpublished “Passion for One’s Work” scale.
2. Welch’s t test was employed to account for unequal variances between the groups.
3. We did not measure workload at Time 1, so we only present that as a control variable in our Time 2 outcome analyses.