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Looking for Signs of Passion in Employees : a Preliminary Study Exploring the Concept of Passion within an Occupational Context

Bindrim, Sina (2021) Looking for Signs of Passion in Employees : a Preliminary Study Exploring the Concept of Passion within an Occupational Context.

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Abstract:According to the dualistic model of passion, there are two types of passion that people can be motivated by. While harmonious passion has a wide range of benefits for the individual, such as resilience, health, motivation, and happiness, obsessive passion increases the chances for occupational burnout, mental and physical ill-being, and loss of concentration. If obsessive passion can be detected early enough, further consequences can be prevented and an attempt to transform it could be undertaken. This study aims to provide a framework for an algorithm that holds the capability to detect signs of obsessive passion in employees. In order to collect the necessary data to provide a framework for an algorithm to detect obsessive passion, people in leadership positions have been interviewed. Additionally, they have been asked to fill in the Passion Scale in order to measure whether they are being driven by mostly harmonious or obsessive passion. The interviews have then been transcribed and analysed for common themes, speech patterns, and words in order to collect signal words and patterns. As the participants have all been found to be predominantly harmoniously passionate as opposed to obsessive and therefore could not be used for finding speech patterns and signal words for obsessive passion, the focus of the study has first shifted towards finding common themes within harmoniously passionate leaders. Reoccurring themes all have been connected to the mindset and internalisation of harmonious passion, which indicates that passion itself is indeed detectable in text and speech. However, the validity and reliability of these results have been further investigated and discussed in this paper. This study contributes to the field of positive organisational psychology by shedding a light on new potential research questions as this was the first study to attempt to find speech patterns and marker words that signal the type of passion someone is operated by by just the means of textual analysis. The dualistic model of passion and its implications are highly relevant to the field of positive psychology and need to be applied more throughly within organisational research and occupational health management. This thesis attempted to create a solution for detecting either one side of the dualistic model or the other, but has more so raised the question whether every individual can easily be sorted into one of the two groups that the dualistic model suggests exist.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:05 communication studies
Programme:Communication Studies MSc (60713)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/88418
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