What drives passion? An empirical examination on the impact of personality trait interactions and job environments on work passion

Passionate employees are essential for organisational success as they foster higher performance and exhibit lower turnover or absenteeism. While a large body of research has investigated the consequences of passion, we know only little about its antecedents. Integrating trait interaction theory with trait activation theory, this paper examines how personality traits, i.e. conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism impact passion at work across different job situations. Passion has been conceptualized as a two-dimensional construct, consisting of harmonious work passion (HWP) and obsessive work passion (OWP). Our study is based on a sample of N = 824 participants from the myPersonality project. We find a positive relationship between neuroticism and OWP in enterprising environments. Further, we find a three-way interaction between conscientiousness, agreeableness, and enterprising environment in predicting OWP. Our findings imply that the impact of personality configurations on different forms of passion is contingent on the job environment. Moreover, in line with self-regulation theory, the results reveal agreeableness as a “cool influencer” and neuroticism as a “hot influencer” of the relationship between conscientiousness and work passion. We derive practical implications for organisations on how to foster work passion, particularly HWP, in organisations.

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