Passion Plays

In a recent survey, 72% of U.S. college-educated employees listed “pursuing their passion” as an important career goal. This passion paradigm celebrates people who are ready to give it their all by doing what they love, especially among entrepreneurs. But figures such as Elon Musk—known for passion as well as arrogance—show this pursuit is not without its perils.

Indeed, studies show passion also contributes to burnout, frustration, and poorer performance. How can workplace passion be harnessed without backfiring? The answer may lie in understanding how it can lead to overconfidence and how managers can use that understanding, according to new research published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“Overconfidence is a really pernicious form of bias,” says Assistant Professor Erica Bailey, who conducted a series of studies with a team of researchers to explore how passion relates to overconfidence.

Using a variety of methodologies, Bailey and her team demonstrated that passionate employees—in both real-world and hypothetical situations—inflated self-ratings of their performance above their actual performance. Co-workers did the same. “This association between passion and superior performance exists and is pretty easy to trigger in people’s minds—even just by telling people they were passionate about their jobs,” Bailey says.

For managers, Bailey says the challenges of performance overconfidence are two-fold. They must manage their own favorable bias toward passionate employees while knowing how and when to encourage them. Entrepreneurs and salespeople may benefit from passion overconfidence but pilots and surgeons, who require accurate views of their abilities, may not. 

“Managers have to consider how the passionate person is perceived by their horizontal co-workers and how to help them manage that reputation so these groups can work together effectively,” Bailey says.