Your Most Passionate Employees May Not Be Your Top Performers
Passion and performance, two seemingly intertwined aspects of an employee's work ethic, may not always align. Explore the intriguing paradox where your most passionate employees might not necessarily be your top performers.
Summary
People who work to achieve a sense of personal fulfillment and make the world a better place have been shown to experience stronger work and life satisfaction and feel more successful, but are they objectively more successful in their careers?
- Recent research has found evidence that calling-oriented employees do actually tend to achieve higher pay and organizational status.
- This suggests that it’s because managers tend to be biased toward those with a calling orientation.
- Professionals themselves need to adjust their view of having a passion for work as a requisite for success.
The Halo – and Deceit – of Purpose
We also asked participants to rate Sam’s job performance and organizational commitment and analyzed whether these assessments had an effect on participants’ decisions about Sam’s bonus, raise, and promotion.
- The findings suggest that calling-oriented Sam’s career achievements did indeed result from our pretend managers’ misperceptions about his performance and commitment.
- What’s more, calling-orientated Sam was perceived by participants as more intrinsically motivated, more passionate, seeing his work as more meaningful, and generally more positive.
The Benefits of a Calling
Managers might be misperceiving calling-oriented employees’ levels of performance and their likelihood of staying at the organization for the long haul
- This in turn might affect how the managers decided to reward those employees
- What psychologists call signaling theory suggests that managers make decisions based on observable actions when they do not have complete information about their employees’ unobservable traits
- Availability bias can reinforce this by predisposing managers to judge employee performance and commitment based on easily available information rather than a detailed assessment on output or results
Why a Calling Pays
An experiment to understand why calling-oriented employees tended to outearn others
- Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups – job orientation, calling orientation or a control group with no specific work orientation
- In each group, participants were presented with a scenario in which an employee, Sam, reveals his work orientation in a recorded Zoom conversation with a colleague, Taylor
- Sam does not make any statements that indicate that he is dedicated to working at the organization for the long term in either recording
- The participants were then asked to imagine they were Sam’s manager who inadvertently accessed the recording without his knowledge and to what extent they would support his getting promoted
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