The passion bug: How and when do leaders inspire work passion?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2443
• Date: 01 June 2020
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Author: Violet T. Ho,Marina N. Astakhova

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The passion bug: How and when do leaders inspire work

passion?

Violet T. Ho

1

| Marina N. Astakhova

2

1

Robins School of Business, University of

Richmond, Richmond, VA, U.S.A.

2

College of Business and Technology, The

University of Texas at Tyler, Tyler, TX, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Marina N. Astakhova, College of Business and

Technology, The University of Texas at Tyler,

3900 University Blvd., Tyler, TX 75799, U.S.A.

Email: mastakhova@uttyler.edu

Funding information

Robins School of Business, University of

Richmond

Summary

Drawing from signaling theory, we propose a work passion transfer model where

leaders' passion is transmitted to employees through the former's leadership style

and is contingent on employees' perceived importance of performance to self-esteem

(IPSE). Data from 201 supervisor–employee dyads from the health-care industry

show that leaders' harmonious passion led to employees' harmonious passion

through charismatic leadership, whereas contingent reward leadership accounted for

the transfer of obsessive passion; IPSE did not play a moderating role for either form

of passion. Results from a supplementary study further reveal that the link between

leadership and employee passion operated through employees' perception of leader

passion and that employees' IPSE accentuated for the relationship between per-

ceived leader obsessive passion and employees' obsessive passion. This study

advances research in work passion, leadership, and signaling theory and provides

important implications for managerial practice.

KEYWORDS

charismatic leadership, contingent reward leadership, harmonious passion, importance of

performance to self-esteem, obsessive passion, passion transfer, signaling theory,work

passion

1|INTRODUCTION

The motivational construct of work passion, defined as one's strong

inclination toward work that the individual loves and that is part of

one's identity (Vallerand, 2015; Vallerand, Houlfort, & Forest, 2014),

has received growing attention in both academic literature and the

business press (e.g., Hagel, Brown, Ranjan, & Byler, 2014; Vallerand &

Houlfort, 2019). Cultivating passion at work is viewed as “a corner-

stone of talent development”(Hagel et al., 2014) because of the posi-

tive impact work passion has on individuals' work attitudes, behaviors,

and well-being (Vallerand et al., 2014). Surprisingly, however, scant

knowledge exists on how work passion can be fostered in the work-

place. The few studies on work passion antecedents have primarily

adopted an individual-focused approach, arguing that the roots of

passion stem from individuals' preexisting capacities and abilities

(e.g., signature strengths), personality traits (e.g., autonomy personal-

ity), and identity centrality and salience (Forest et al., 2012; Murnieks,

Mosakowski, & Cardon, 2014; Vallerand et al., 2006). However, self-

determination theory, which provides the theoretical underpinning for

the work passion construct, suggests that such an individual-focused

approach can be incomplete, given that social and/or environmental

influences also “catalyze both within- and between-person differ-

ences”in the person's motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 68; Vallerand

et al., 2014), thereby warranting investigations of environmental ante-

cedents of work passion.

To address this missing perspective in passion research, we exam-

ine the role of leaders and their work passion as an environmental fac-

tor that can influence employees' work passion. Of the multitude of

situational forces that can shape employee passion, leaders are partic-

ularly salient because in their role as “entrepreneurs of identity”

(Reicher, Haslam, & Hopkins, 2005, p. 547), they have profound influ-

ence on subordinates' self-concepts and identities (Lord, Brown, &

Feiberg, 1999) and can be instrumental in shaping the extent to which

work becomes part of employees' identity (a fundamental element of

Received: 14 November 2018 Revised: 10 March 2020 Accepted: 29 March 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2443

424 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:424–444.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

work passion). Additionally, because “(l)eaders are important links

between individuals and their organizations …, and the relationship

with one's supervisor is a lens through which the entire work experi-

ence is viewed”(Lord et al., 1999, pp. 169–170), leaders can directly

or indirectly influence subordinates' experiences and motivation at

work (Barling, Christie, & Hoption, 2010). Finally, to the extent that

leaders are viewed by employees as role models by virtue of their

positional power and status (Brown & Treviño, 2014; Gibson, 2003),

they are particularly salient and relevant in shaping employees' views

of whether and why work should be important to them. Together,

these reasons underscore the key role that leaders play in influencing

employees' work experiences and identities, and the need to investi-

gate whether, how, and when leaders' passion shapes employees'

passion.

To date, only one study has attempted to examine how work pas-

sion passes from leaders to employees. Drawing on the argument that

leaders' emotional states can be mirrored by workers via emotional

contagion (e.g., Bono & Ilies, 2006), Li, Zhang, and Yang (2017) found

that leaders' work passion increased employees' emotional contagion

(albeit measured as an individual difference) and, in turn, employees'

passion. However, despite its applicability for explaining the transfer

of positive emotions associated with passion, the emotional contagion

argument fails to account for the identity component of work passion,

whereby work is internalized into employees' identity and defines

who they are. Consequently, emotional contagion may not be suffi-

cient in explaining the transfer of passion, and while “primitive emo-

tional mimicry may increase the emotional display of employees, it

alone will not induce employee passion”(Cardon, 2008, p. 83). Thus,

we draw on an alternative conceptual framework, signaling theory

(Spence, 1973, 2002), to address a broader series of questions—Can a

leader's work passion transfer or transmit to employees? If so, can

leadership style function as a signaling mechanism through which

leaders' passion is transmitted to shape employees' passion? Addition-

ally, are certain employees more susceptible than others to such sig-

nals from leaders?

The significance and relevance of signaling theory to the present

study are three-fold. First, because passion incorporates an internali-

zation component where work is internalized into one's identity,

employees need to know why work is important and meaningful to

their identities (e.g., for its inherent characteristics and learning value,

or for the instrumental rewards and outcomes), as this determines

whether work is internalized in an autonomous or controlled fashion

and, in turn, whether employees have harmonious or obsessive pas-

sion (Vallerand, 2015). Signals from the leader are particularly salient

in addressing these identity-related issues because, as described ear-

lier, leaders are especially influential in shaping subordinates' self-

identity (Lord et al., 1999; Lord & Brown, 2001, 2004). Second, signal-

ing theory recognizes that the signaling process is deliberate in nature,

whereby passionate leaders intentionally convey their work passion

through their leadership behaviors for certain strategic effects. This

contrasts against emotional contagion, which tends to be subtle,

unconscious, and automatic (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993) and

does not recognize the possibility that leaders can be intentional and

strategic in deciding how to convey their work passion. A third advan-

tage of signaling theory is that it considers not only the signaler's

(i.e., leader) characteristics but also those of the receiver

(i.e., employee), thereby recognizing that signals do not necessarily get

received and interpreted in the same way by all receivers, and all-

owing for a more granular investigation of when (and when not) a sig-

nal may impact the receiver.

In the present context, this granular investigation takes the form

of the moderating role of the employees' importance of performance

to self-esteem, or IPSE, which captures the extent to which an individ-

ual's self-esteem is contingent on workplace performance (Ferris, Lian,

Brown, & Morrison, 2015) and, we predict, modifies employees' atten-

tion to signals sent by the leader. Because high-IPSE employees stake

their self-worth on work performance (Ferris et al., 2015), they will be

more vigilant in scanning for signals from leaders, whose traditional

function in organizations “involves the control and evaluation of

employee job performance”(Waldman, Bass, & Einstein, 1987, p. 177)

and thus convey cues and signals relevant to performance. In particu-

lar, compared with broader personality traits and individual differ-

ences (e.g., the Big Five traits), IPSE is more relevant to the present

context as it captures one's “plasticity”or malleability to external influ-

ences (Ferris, Lian, Brown, Pang, & Keeping, 2010), which is a unique

component embedded in contingent self-esteem constructs like IPSE

but not in more general personality traits (Ferris et al., 2010). Thus,

IPSE is particularly well suited to predict one's reactivity to

performance-relevant cues and signals in the workplace.

Overall, signaling theory and its elemental aspects offer a more

fine-grained account of how and when leaders' passion gets transmit-

ted to shape employees' passion and form the basis for our proposed

moderated mediation model of passion transfer where leaders' pas-

sion is signaled (mediated) through their leadership styles to shape

employees' passion, and employees' IPSE moderates the degree to

which leadership styles influence their passion. In testing this model,

our study makes at least three contributions to extant research in

work passion. First, it is one of few empirical studies to not only pro-

vide evidence for passion transfer from leaders to employees but also

explicate the mechanism through which this occurs. Even more impor-

tantly, because leadership style expresses the leader's morals, values,

and emotions to employees (Antonakis, Bastardoz, Jacquart, &

Shamir, 2016) and conveys a psychologically central leader identity

(Shamir & Eilam, 2005), our proposed mechanism (leadership styles) is

well suited to capture both the strong liking and identity elements

central to passion, over and above the emotional contagion mecha-

nism previously proposed.

The second contribution pertains to the synthesis of passion and

leadership research to theorize about how leaders' work passion can

manifest in distinct leadership approaches. Although prior research

has linked leadership styles to employees' passion (Houlfort,

Vallerand, & Koestner, 2013), the connection between the leader's

own passion and his or her leadership approach has yet to be

explored. Addressing this missing link contributes to the passion liter-

ature by showing that the reach of work passion extends beyond con-

ventional psychological states (e.g., well-being) and work attitudes and

HO AND ASTAKHOVA 425