Passion is often touted as a key ingredient for success, but new research suggests it can also lead to overconfidence and interpersonal issues in the workplace. This article explores the pitfalls of passion and how managers can navigate these challenges to harness the benefits of a passionate team. Overconfidence and passion are examined in the context of employee performance and workplace dynamics.
The Paradox of Passion
This is a remarkably common piece of advice handed down to many young professionals who set out to find career success. Passion is so often lauded as essential to success in the entrepreneurial space. Nonetheless, cautionary tales spring to mind such as well-meaning figures like Elon Musk that share a blend of both passion and arrogance.
The research, recently published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, takes a closer look at the relationship between passion and overconfidence, offering insights for managers who must walk this narrow line. Research by Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley founder Ben Funkhouser and associate professor Cameron Anderson offers insights into the potential pitfalls of working with too much passion.
Human Performance Overconfidence
In the first study, more than 800 employees at a Chinese engineering company underwent tests to measure their sense of identity with their employer. Over 20 consecutive workdays, the participants rated their passion and performance along with the performance of their teammates. There was a clear pattern in the results the more passionate employees were, the more they tended to overrate their performance compared to their peers!
This confirms previous findings that performers who participate with passion are likely to overestimate their performance well beyond their objective skills. We also saw some interpersonal costs associated with this,” says Erica Bailey, the lead researcher. This can be a touchy issue because if you pay attention to yourself in the mirror or upon your performance, heck, what is worse than that is when you see it all but no one else perceives this quite similarly between themselves and you.
Using the Fire of Passion
In a second study, the researchers asked close to 400 full-time workers in the U.S. to imagine themselves as being as passionate or punctual on the job (?) as possible. Even when everyone else their co-workers, in this case, was telling them that they were only average, the “passionate” employees still thought performance had nowhere to go but up.
This shows a powerful tendency for people to assume that passion has some sort of connection with his success, creating greater confidence while the evidence points in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, managers will have to figure out how to do that without either working too hard or screwing themselves over.
Passionate employees provide several advantages. They are enthusiastic, they are funny enough to be fun to manage. They will add spunk to the meetings. “Right away, they’re going to get people in the door,” Bailey said. ‘However, figure out how you might mitigate risks associated with being biased towards passionate employees. First, managers themselves need to be policed — as do also the most passionate workers who are both less likely to delegate, know whether they even have blind spots, or see themselves as part of a team.
