Riding the Passion Wave or Fighting to Stay Afloat? A Theory of Differentiated Passion Contagion

The 20-day experience sampling study is methodologically ambitious. What were the main challenges, both in capturing passion trajectories, and in the research collection process?

Jon: One of the main challenges of this project was finding a context that allowed for multiple data collection points within each day and across multiple days. If you want to study trajectories, you need at least three time points to meaningfully examine change over time. With fewer than three, it becomes very difficult to interpret what is actually happening. With only two measurements, for example, you cannot tell whether something is increasing, decreasing, or fluctuating in between -how it truly moves from one time point to the next.

This raised an important practical question: how do you conduct such intensive data collection in a real work setting? How do you find an organization where it is feasible to ask employees to participate so frequently? That was a major challenge. At the same time, we had to balance these practical constraints with our ambitions. Ideally, we would have liked to collect data five or six times a day. One of our reviewers even suggested hourly measurements, which is a great idea in theory, but it simply does not fit organizational reality.

Even three measurements per day are very demanding. If you look at experience sampling recommendations, two measurements per day, such as one at the beginning and one at the end of the workday, are often considered the maximum that is realistically feasible. Collecting data three times a day was ambitious, but it was also necessary for the kind of state-level processes we were interested in capturing. Another critical consideration was the team context. We needed participants who worked in stable teams over time, because our interest was in how people navigate influence within teams. Many organizations use teams, but in some cases, employees interact only minimally, or team membership is very fluid across projects. While those contexts are fascinating in their own right, they make it harder to observe the specific phenomenon we were studying.

This challenge was further amplified by the fact that our data collection took place during COVID, when remote work was widespread. We were therefore looking for a setting where our phenomenon would be especially visible -namely, teams that worked together regularly, primarily in person.

We were very fortunate to gain access to an engineering organization that met these criteria. Unfortunately, we cannot share many details in order to protect the organization’s identity. However, as noted in the paper, many participants were research and development professionals. They worked together on a project basis with stable team membership and had sufficient autonomy in their work schedules to participate in the study.

In terms of the data collection process, we worked with a large team of research assistants who were on site, and we collected the data using paper-and-pencil surveys. We chose this approach for several reasons. First, it allowed us to highlight the steps we took to protect the confidentiality of participants’ responses. Participants could see exactly what information was being collected, which helped build trust. Second, it made our presence visible and tangible. Employees would come to designated conference rooms to complete the surveys, either privately or alongside others, depending on their preference. Each department had a designated conference room where participants could complete the survey, seal it in an envelope, and deposit it into a locked drop box. This process reassured participants that no one else had access to their responses. Research assistants were present to remind participants when it was time to complete the survey, which was essential given the intensity of the data collection.

“Importantly, the organization was fully supportive of the project. Participation became normative: employees understood why the study was being conducted, what their role was, and why their contribution mattered.”

Importantly, the organization was fully supportive of the project. Participation became normative: employees understood why the study was being conducted, what their role was, and why their contribution mattered. Seeing colleagues participate also helped legitimize the time spent on the surveys – it did not feel like a distraction from work.

All of this made it possible to collect data three times a day. It also helped that the organization had a structured lunch break, which allowed us to schedule one of the measurement points just before lunch, when employees were naturally transitioning between activities.

Could you walk us through how you gained organizational access and ensured such high compliance rates in a repeated daily experience-sampling study?

Jon: Within our co-author network, we have individuals that work in a variety of different organizations. We present the requirements that we have for our data collection effort, but we also share what we’re able to offer and explain why an organization would want to partner with us. We can often design our study in ways that can help us answer questions that organizations are deeply interested in, e.g., “Why are employees burning out?” or “What are key impediments to performance? We have to be careful with anything that could lead to the identification of individual employees, but when we analyze the data, we’re able to provide them with insights as to what we have found at an aggregated group level. We try to be very clear about what the organizations could get because obviously we don’t necessarily know what will work or what may not work.

In business schools, we engage with people we have taught that now work in organizations, or people that come into the university as executives, and so we cultivate these relationships. I use my LinkedIn, and former graduates are more likely to at least get on a call with me about a potential study. For PhD students, a key and fundamental part of what it means to be an academic is to figure out how to cultivate relationships with people in organizations, learn how to talk to them, and understand what challenges and issues they face. We are quite well-suited to address many of the problems that organizations face, and we may be able to use methodologies, like an experience sampling approach, that consultants could not. It provides us with strong arguments for why organizations could collaborate with us. Since they don’t pay us, we show why our studies could go above and beyond, why that’s important and what insights our study could reveal.

Emma: I’ve taught a lot of undergrads. So even if the students may not have organizational connections, sometimes their parents will. Jon: That’s a big benefit – it’s usually beneficial for everybody. People want to help their former institutions. You can even get valuable data when you don’t get access to an organization, which Michel Anteby has written about. Relationships can be long, and even if we can’t collaborate in a particular instance, perhaps we’re able to reconnect later, and ensure whatever interaction we have is mutually beneficial.

How confident are you that social evaluative concerns – not other mechanisms such as impression management or identity affirmation – are the primary drivers of this effortful response?

Emma: When I think about our study and how the effect moves with the team -how individuals’ trajectories follow the team -I think that if this were purely about identity affirmation, we would see something different. If everyone simply wanted to be seen as passionate, or wanted to believe that they themselves are passionate, we would expect everyone’s passion levels to increase. Or, theoretically, if some people wanted to be seen as not passionate, we would expect no systematic relationship between the team’s trajectory and an individual’s own trajectory.

Jon: Yes, and I’ll add to that by saying that everything in the social sciences is multiply determined – there are always multiple processes at play. One reason we believe that social evaluative concerns are driving this effect is that we were able to combine a field study with an experiment. That’s really the advantage of experimental work. In experiments, you can’t identify all possible drivers, because you necessarily abstract away from reality. But you can do your best to isolate a particular driver or contributing factor and show why it matters in this specific context, especially relative to other related variables.

One comparison I particularly like is between positive affect and passion. Positive affect is still desirable, but it’s less socially desirable than passion. There’s less of a penalty for coming to work feeling a bit less happy. In contrast, when everyone around you is highly passionate, there’s a greater concern that you might be judged negatively if you’re not equally passionate. It’s really this comparison that helps identify the role of social evaluative concerns, rather than something like “I want to feel happy because feeling happy makes me feel good.” That logic could also apply to passion, but we see different effects for these two constructs, which supports the social evaluation explanation.

You highlight that passion is dynamic and changes throughout the workday. Could you explain why you chose to measure this change, what you call the “passion trajectory”, as a way of capturing the contagion process itself? And were there other ways you considered measuring how passion shifts over time?

Emma: Beyond what we’ve already mentioned, we started off with trajectories as a lens going in. I have a JAP paper that looks at emotion regulation, and I propose that you can capture emotion regulation via trajectories, because it shows you more than just a snapshot of where I’m at – it shows where I’ve been and the journey I took to get there. The JAP paper had already come out when I met Jon, and he talked to me about it, which was the beginnings our current paper. I think trajectories are a really theoretically and empirically sound way to look at regulation or changes in emotions. And that’s what we wanted to look at here – the contagion process and what that looks like. Jon: As much as I love the passion literature, I’ve been frustrated by some of the empirical approaches to studying it. One finding that has been uncontested is that passion spreads effortlessly from one person to the next. There’s a bunch of papers on that. But the challenge is that when you actually look at the data that this claim is based on, it is mostly correlational. It doesn’t allow you to disentangle whether passion spreads from one person to the other because people catch the passion or because people feel internal pressure to become more passionate in response.

Emma’s paper raises the possibility that both things could happen, which previously we didn’t necessarily really think about. Typically, in the past, you would have looked at the passion levels of other people, and then my passion level, and then seen whether there is a change in my passion level when your passion level changes. You would look at the end state of passion and use that to demonstrate that I have caught your passion. But in reality, how I feel at the end of any given time period is both influenced by you directly, meaning I have caught your passion, and indirectly. You have changed how much pressure I feel leading me to engage in more regulatory efforts. We needed a way to disentangle between whether I am catching your passion automatically or whether I am making myself more passionate because I feel the pressure.

Emma’s brilliant idea of this trajectory actually allows us to disentangle these two possibilities, because that’s what captures the regulation from the actual end state. We weren’t able to do that before. It gets tricky because all other ways that you could theoretically imagine capturing changes in the passion state require people to be consciously aware of the fact that their passion state changes. It is probably a mix of both conscious and subconscious processes, but contagion literature tends to ask people to report on their changes in passion and effort, which may provide us with a skewed picture of what is actually happening. By using trajectories, we don’t need to rely on people’s conscious reports of what they’re doing.

“Everyone acknowledges that there’s subconscious and conscious elements to contagion, but most papers primarily examine the subconscious elements. This means that the way we treat it theoretically is very different than the way we tend to measure it empirically, or show proof of contagion.”

Emma: What I love about this is that we have such different lenses that we come into it with, but they fit really well together. Jon is so good at knowing the passion literature, which I’ve never studied. He gets so fired up about us needing to understand passion better. I have lots of thoughts and feelings about the contagion literature. Everyone acknowledges that there’s subconscious and conscious elements to contagion, but most papers primarily examine the subconscious elements. This means that the way we treat it theoretically is very different than the way we tend to measure it empirically, or show proof of contagion. The measurement process makes it seem like contagion is so easy and requires no effort.

Jon: If I were to abstract that to the higher order construct of what connects us, I’d say we both felt that there were key challenges that the literature had insufficiently grappled with. Emma, you were saying that it’s known that the contagion literature has talked about conscious and subconscious processes theoretically, but then empirically, everybody studies subconscious processes. It was known, but nobody really problematized it. And similarly in the passion literature, everyone knows that the idea that passion is a bug that you can catch from others is overly simplified, but that idea is rarely problematized. So what unites Emma and I is that we worry that people walk away with the wrong idea. Either the idea that any emotion is just something you can catch automatically, or in the passion literature, that passion is an unallayed good that you can catch from others.

Based on your theory of differentiated passion contagion, how do you anticipate a team leader’s level of passion may influence employees’ perceptions of pressure or felt obligation to match that passion, particularly when the leader’s passion exceeds that of the broader team?

Emma: Let me start by saying that we didn’t examine leaders in this study, so I’m happy to speculate, but that’s all this is: speculation. What we do find -and this is actually one of our favorite findings, because it’s just fun- is that the effect is strongest when you are the low-passion outlier. That is, when you’re noticeably lower than the rest of the team, the social evaluative pressure becomes magnified. It feels like all eyes are on you, like, I’m the weird one here.

Thinking through that, we wondered whether a leader could potentially moderate this effect. A very passionate leader could represent another source of pressure. But if you’re not the lowest outlier, you might be okay – you might be able to skate by. It’s almost like, Well, Jon is lower than me, so at least the attention is going to go to him.

Jon: If anything, we would expect leader passion to act as a moderator. I think it gets especially interesting when you think about this at the team level. It’s important to remember that we’re talking about momentary passion here. Passion fluctuates over time. We’re not looking at between-person differences in passion, but at within-person, momentary passion. So, there may be moments when a team leader is particularly passionate -when they get really fired up. In those moments, it might matter less if you’re not the least passionate person on the team if there are others who are lower than you. But it still means that the pressure is intensified. If you are the least passionate person, and your leader is highly passionate in that moment, that can be especially challenging.

The social evaluative concerns we focus on are relative to team members. I don’t necessarily care whether I’m more or less passionate than my leader. My primary comparison is still with my teammates. What matters is how harshly I worry my leader might judge me for standing out. So, I can imagine a number of different pathways operating here, but I don’t think it’s the same mechanism we examine in this paper. That’s something future research should explore.

How did you first connect, and when did you decide to collaborate? Do you have any advice for network-building for PhD students and early career scholars?

Jon: This is my favorite story of how a paper started. I was on the committee when Emma applied for a job at HBS. Since emotion research is a little outside of my wheelhouse, I had never seen her work before, but I loved it. After Emma got a job outside of HBS, I reached out and asked if she’d be interested in talking, since I could see how her work has relevance for passion. I was already in the process of collecting this data at the time with Wen, and I wanted to ask her advice about so much of it.

We were not all that closely in touch until August, when we were both flying from Boston to Seattle for AoM. We hadn’t met in person yet, so we came up with this amazing idea to sit next to each other for the 6-hour flight and work on this paper. Emma and I were talking nonstop for hours, and this is when the main findings shook out. The stewardess even came by and said, “you two must be old friends reconnecting,” and we said “no, we just met.” It was a lot of fun, but we were just sitting there with our laptops, working on this.

Emma: That is our origin story. As for network-building, I have made so many friends through the job market. I was on the job market the year after the COVID market, so I was applying to a lot of positions. And it was great because you have people like Jon who are so kind and read through every application and email you. I met so many people through job talks, both at the universities I applied to, and other people in my cohort. We had group chat to sort of vent about the challenges.

Jon: What has been most important for me has been trying to figure out what community of scholars I belong to. If you think of a network structure where some people are closer to each other than others, it was helpful for me to figure out what group of scholars I feel are closest to me. What conferences do they go to? Do I like their methodological orientation, their theoretical foundations? It might take some experimentation to see where you feel you belong.

Do you have passion for your work? What did passion on this research team look like?

Emma: I would say I do have passion for my work, but my main passion comes from the people I work with. When I think of passion and the deeply meaningful, identity-relevant things, I think of the people I care about, and the co-authors that will be my friends for life. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of them in this field, and this paper is one example of that. I was very passionate about this project because I genuinely loved who I was working on it with.

Jon: Similar to Emma, I don’t write alone, and I like working with others, but I’m quite selective about my circle of co-authors. And it’s because I care so deeply about the work. I have grand ambitions with this work. So many people say “wow, you’re so passionate about passion!” as if it’s a joke I’ve never heard before. But I will still laugh and smile because it’s true.

We know that passion has positive outcomes. I would make the argument that the strength of the relationship is a lot weaker than it could be, meaning there’s a lot more potential to passion than we currently identify. In part because we have misunderstood what passion is and how it operates. And if we only understood passion better, I think that passion would have a much stronger positive effect on a wide variety of positive outcomes in the world.

“We probably rely on passion a little bit too much, but if we’re going to do that, we ought to do a better job of figuring out how to do that better. I hope that through this work, we can really help unlock all the things that people are passionate about.”

There’s also a lot of necessity for passion in the world right now. There’s a lot of things that need changing and doing, and we often rely on passion to help make that change. Passion is probably not the only thing that we should rely on. We probably rely on passion a little bit too much, but if we’re going to do that, we ought to do a better job of figuring out how to do that better. I hope that through this work, we can really help unlock all the things that people are passionate about.

Lastly, I often have almost passion therapy sessions. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with people who say that they’ve lost their passion or that they don’t know what they’re passionate about. If passion were so easy, we wouldn’t struggle with it so much. It strikes me as a consequence of our having misunderstood passion and perpetuating myths of passion in the world that are, at best, unhelpful, and at worst, actually undermine, passion.

Is there anything you want to add or that we’ve missed talking about?

Jon: The last contagion paper that was published in ASQ was the amazing paper by Sigal Barsde [2002], over 20 years ago. We feel extremely proud to be part of the intellectual tradition of scholars that are examining these processes, and it’s a big honor to be part of that in ASQ. We wrote our paper very much hoping that our theoretical model and speculations could be used as a starting point. Our goal is that other researchers can take our foundation and extend it in new and interesting directions.

Emma: Even in Sigal’s paper, she talked about conscious and subconscious processes. We are trying to bring attention to a piece that was there from the beginning, that we believe deserves more focus.

Jon: We’re asking, what if we took that piece more seriously? What would a model look like? We want to move scholarship on contagion forward and move beyond saying that passion or emotions spread or don’t spread. We want to think about the different processes that might work against one another, how to study that empirically, and what methodological approaches we’d need.

As much as I love the passion component of our paper, I hope it also speaks to contagion scholars, and brings attention back to some of the theoretical maxims in Sigal’s paper that have been overlooked. Towards the end of our paper, we have a theoretical model, and we speculate. We wrote that very much hoping that someone will use it as a starting point and hopefully take it into new and interesting directions.

Emma: It all goes back to the conscious and subconscious processes. We wanted to point out that we’ve missed a piece that was there from the beginning that we want to bring back in.

Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644-675.

Interviewer Bio:
Amelia Emery (amelia.emery@northwestern.edu) is a PhD candidate in Media, Technology and Society at Northwestern University. Her mixed methods research examines team wellbeing and leadership, with a particular focus on remote and hybrid teams.
Evita Psoni (ppsoni@aueb.gr) is a PhD Candidate in Organizational Behavior at Athens University of Economics and Business and a Fellow of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. She has published 13 papers in international journals and others in conferences. She is Adjunct Faculty for the undergraduate and MBA programs of London Metropolitan University and Cardiff Metropolitan University at City Unity College, Greece.