Prior research suggests employees benefit from highly passionate teammates because passion spreads easily from one employee to the next. We develop theory to propose that life in high-passion teams may not be as uniformly advantageous as previously assumed. More precisely, we suggest that high-passion teams also evoke pressures that lead employees to engage in effortful attempts to increase how passionate they feel, negating their benefits. We first conducted an experience sampling study at an engineering company involved in the production and maintenance of critical infrastructure that benefits the greater good with 829 employees nested in 155 teams, surveyed three times per day across 20 consecutive workdays. These data show that employees surrounded by more passionate teammates were more likely to “catch” others’ passion, and consequently reported better performance, lower emotional exhaustion, and a stronger sense of social connection. However, these benefits coexisted alongside costs associated with increasing their passion. In a subsequent pre-registered experiment (N = 1,063), we provide causal evidence for these effects, their underlying mechanism, and that passion contagion is particularly effort-laden—more so than contagion of other states and non-contagion passion increases. We develop a theory of differentiated passion contagion that exposes the effort inherent in contagion and implications of that effort. Our work suggests that passion caught from others may hold less value than passion incited from within, and shifts our understanding of when and why passion for work is beneficial and detrimental. We also discuss implications for broader emotional contagion theory.
