Organizational Antecedents of Work Passion: The Roles of Perceived Organizational Support and Organizational Time Demands

Despite emerging scholarly work about work passion and its reverence in the popular press, we know little about how organizations can cultivate passionate employees. In this study, we utilized cognitive evaluation theory and the dualistic model of passion to explain the different ways in which harmonious and obsessive work passion can be nurtured, further affecting employee outcomes. Accordingly, we expect that work contexts that provide employees with perceived organizational support (POS) would be conducive for harmonious passion, while contexts with organizational time demands (OTD) rather encourage obsessive passion. We also expect that the two types of passion will mediate the relationships between these work contexts and employee outcomes, including job satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, and helping behaviors. Utilizing a time-lag survey study consisting of 194 matched employee-coworker dyads in the Philippines, we found empirical support for the following proposed relationships: (a) POS predicts harmonious passion; (b) OTD predicts obsessive passion; (c) harmonious passion mediates the relationship between POS and outcomes, such as job satisfaction, psychological wellbeing and helping behaviors; and (d) obsessive passion mediates the relationship between OTD and psychological wellbeing. Our findings provide important theoretical implications for research on work passion as well as practical recommendations for managers.