The Challenge of Maintaining Passion for Work over Time: A Daily Perspective on Passion and Emotional Exhaustion

Abstract

Passion for work is highly coveted, but many employees report struggling to maintain their passion over time. In the current research, we explain the challenge of pursuing passion by conceptualizing passion as an attribute with temporal variation. Viewed through a daily lens, we argue that self-regulation plays a critical role in understanding the challenges underlying the daily maintenance of passion. More specifically, we hypothesize that—unless employees adequately regulate their passion on any given day—higher levels of passion will lead them to invest more time and energy into their work, decreasing their psychological detachment from work after the workday, and consequently resulting in higher levels of emotional exhaustion the next day. Higher levels of emotional exhaustion on a given day subsequently prompt a greater need for recovery, shifting employees’ focus away from devoting time and energy into work, thereby eroding their passion on the following day. Two daily-diary studies covering 30 and 10 consecutive working days provided support for our predictions (N total = 798; k total = 15,702). Employees who felt more in charge of their passion on any given day engaged in self-regulation during their workday, increasing their psychological detachment from work and subsequently being less likely to suffer the detrimental consequences of higher daily passion. Our theory and findings demonstrate the daily interplay between passion and emotional exhaustion and specify why passion may be self-limiting unless employees adequately manage it, reflecting a challenge they need to navigate each day in pursuing their passion. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1673 .