Understanding contemporary forms of exploitation: Attributions of passion serve to legitimize the poor treatment of workers.
Scite shows how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation, a classification describing whether it supports, mentions, or contrasts the cited claim, and a label indicating in which section the citation was made. The pursuit of passion in one’s work is touted in contemporary discourse. Although passion may indeed be beneficial in many ways, we suggest that the modern cultural emphasis may also serve to facilitate the legitimization of unfair and demeaning management practices—a phenomenon we term the legitimization of passion exploitation. Across 7 studies and a meta-analysis, we show that people do in fact deem poor worker treatment (e.g., asking employees to do demeaning tasks that are irrelevant to their job description, asking employees to work extra hours without pay) as more legitimate when workers are presumed to be “passionate” about their work. Of importance, we demonstrate 2 mediating mechanisms by which this process of legitimization occurs: (a