From business leaders to athletes to everyday employees, passion is often cited as a key ingredient in the success of high achievers. Consider Elon Musk, whose passion is undeniable. He followed this drive and went on to popularize electric cars through Tesla and reinvigorate space transportation via SpaceX.
But Musk has also been called “galactically arrogant,” often overpromising on timelines for new technologies and product features (e.g., fully self-driving cars), as well as his ability to lead an organizational turnaround in an industry where he has little experience (e.g., Twitter/X).
This duality is not uncommon, suggesting a link between passion and overconfidence — a link that may undermine the potential of passion to boost performance. Studies have shown that in some cases, feeling passionate can lead to burnout, frustration, and worse performance. What’s at the root of these inconsistent effects of passion? And what can we do to reap the benefits of passion at work, without falling prey to its downsides?
Passion Skews Self-Views
To explore how passion relates to overconfidence, we conducted a series of studies with more than 1,000 employees from the U.S. and China. Our findings suggest that the overconfidence that so often goes hand in hand with passion may help explain why feeling passion doesn’t (always) lead people to perform better.
1. Passionate people rate themselves higher than their colleagues do.
In our first study, we asked more than 800 employees at an engineering company in China to rate their own passion and performance, as well as the performance of their teammates, every morning and afternoon for 20 consecutive workdays.
We found that when employees reported higher levels of passion in the morning, their coworkers evaluated their performance higher that afternoon — but the more passionate employees were, the more they rated their own performance even higher than their coworkers did. In other words, in line with prior research, passion was related to higher performance.
However, also in line with prior research, employees’ perceptions of their performance were inflated beyond their actual improvement. Thus, the passionate employees in our study may have been even more overconfident than our data indicates, as their outward expressions of passion may have biased their coworkers to rate them even more highly than their actual performance justified.
2. Passionate people rate themselves higher than performance data indicates they should.
In our next study, we asked nearly 400 full-time U.S. employees to imagine they were either highly passionate or highly punctual in a hypothetical job. We told them all that their performance had been rated as “average” by their colleagues, and then we asked them to rate how well they thought they’d perform in their role.
We found that despite all participants being told that their performance was only middling, the participants who we led to think of themselves as highly passionate predicted that their future performance would improve more than those who were told they are highly punctual. People who were led to feel more passionate about their job expected that they would also be more engaged at work, that they would work longer and harder, and that their performance would improve as a result, despite knowing that their performance had been rated as only so-so.
While this study is limited in its reliance on a hypothetical context rather than real-world data, this experimental design enabled us to ensure a level of consistency between participants that can be challenging to replicate in real-world environments and offers helpful insight into the extent to which feeling passionate may influence our perceptions of our own abilities.
3. When we feel passionate about someone else, we rate them higher, too.
Finally, in an additional study, we looked at how passion influences people’s perceptions not just of their own abilities, but also the abilities of those they feel passionate about.
We recruited more than 200 fans of the eight American football teams that reached the playoffs in the 2023 U.S. National Football League (NFL) and showed them expert forecasts of the chances that their favorite team and another team would win the Super Bowl, utilizing the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight. After they had a chance to review the forecasts, we asked them to report how likely they thought their favorite team was to win versus another, randomly selected finalist team.
So, what did we find? Participants were consistently overconfident about the chances that their favorite team would win, guessing that the team they were most passionate about was more likely to win than the statistical model suggested. In other words, feeling passionate about a team was associated with inflated perceptions of that team’s future success.
Beware the Pitfalls of Passion
On the one hand, in roles that benefit from a bit of healthy overconfidence, managers might be wise to embrace passion. For example, overconfidence can be helpful in roles that require a lot of persistence, as it can prevent people from giving up when they hit bumps in the road. Research also shows that people who express high levels of confidence are perceived as higher status, so for roles in which success depends on being seen as having high status (such as entrepreneurs, consultants, and salespeople), overconfidence may be more of an advantage than a detriment.
On the other hand, in roles where being overconfident is more dangerous — that is, where an accurate view of one’s own abilities is crucial, such as surgeons, pilots, or financial traders — managers should be especially aware of the association between passion and overconfidence.
To be clear, we are not arguing that managers should discourage passion. Instead, we need to account for the overconfidence that so often accompanies passion. For example, managers may benefit from building in what we refer to as “passion slack” by encouraging passionate employees to add buffer time to an ambitious timeline, to pause and evaluate their bandwidth before saying yes to a new project, or to think proactively about the potential hurdles to which their passion may be blinding them.
In addition, more passionate employees may be less open to negative feedback and more resistant to objective information about their performance, as their rose-colored glasses may inflate their perceptions of their performance and make it harder for them to set realistic expectations. As such, it may be especially important for managers of passionate employees to help them set more realistic expectations for themselves, and to provide feedback regularly to help them develop better self-awareness.
At the end of the day, passion has a lot to offer, but it can also come at a cost. Our research doesn’t suggest that organizations shouldn’t hire passionate people, or even that managing them is inherently harder. It just shows that managing passionate people requires proactivity and vigilance.
By Erica R. Bailey, Kai Krautter, Wen Wu, Adam D. Galinsky, and Jon M. Jachimowicz- July, 2024
Harvard Business Review
