My Work is Who I Am, But it’s Killing Me: An Identity-based Approach to the Paradox of Passion
Karen Landay & Joseph T. Schaefer
What the paper says
Sayings like “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life” epitomize Western society’s emphasis on both the importance and assumed positive nature of passion for work. Although research has linked passion and increased well-being, growing anecdotal evidence suggests the potential for negative individual outcomes of work passion, including decreased well-being and increased stress and burnout. In the present chapter, the authors integrate the Dualistic Model of Passion (which consists of harmonious and obsessive passion), identity theory, and identity threat to describe the paradox of passion, in which individuals overidentify with the target of their passion (i.e., work), resulting in the “too much of a good thing” effect driven by excess passion of either type. The authors thus provide a novel theoretical lens through which to examine the different reactions that individuals may enact in response to threats to passion-related identities, including how these responses might differentially impact well-being, stress, and burnout. The authors conclude by offering future directions for research on the paradox of passion.
3 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.61 × 0.4 = 0.24 |
| M · momentum | 0.80 × 0.15 = 0.12 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.