Passion Gaps Create Ethical Cracks: Lacking Desired Passion Is Associated With Increased Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior

Authors:

Abstract: Many employees wish to experience passion for their work, and organizations increasingly seek to hire passionate employees. The current research explores a drawback to this focus on passion: it can make people vulnerable to experiencing passion gaps, defined as a negative discrepancy between actual and desired levels of passion. Given the high value currently placed on passion in organizations, we contend that passion gaps are self-threatening--that is, in the language of self-affirmation theory, they reduce people’s sense of self-integrity. We further suggest that this threat to self-integrity subsequently increases unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)—immoral acts intended to benefit their organization—because engaging in UPB represents a pathway for individuals to see themselves as valued members of the organization. We provide converging evidence for these predictions from a field study of employees in a technology organization, two online survey studies, and a subsequent experiment (N=2,268). Collectively, our theory and results highlight a potential downside associated with individual and organizational demands for the pursuit of passion for work.

Track: MORAL

Keywords: passion; unethical pro-organizational behavior; self-affirmation; self-integrity; ethics