Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jim Whitehurst for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Executives have begun to understand that to build a great business, companies need a larger goal, one that transcends the traditional bottom line. The best and brightest talent are attracted to organizations that offer a broader purpose. But simply defining a purpose is not enough. It’s just a first step, your organization’s ante to get into the game. What sets companies apart, the companies where people love to work, is passion. People want to be passionate about what they do, and they want to be surrounded by people who are also passionate about what they do.

Unfortunately, the challenge for leaders is that there is no formal management theory for how to build, leverage, and measure the level of passion in your employees. It essentially falls into that ambiguous category of “you’ll know it when you see it.”

For me, a passionate employee is someone who pays attention to the whats and the hows of the company’s strategies and tactics, someone who is involved and curious and who constantly questions what the company is doing and their own role in making it successful. And they do that not because someone ordered them to, but because they want to. That’s the kind of intrinsic reward today’s workers seek out, not the lavish perks or financial bonuses that we mistakenly assumed motivated workers of the past.

For example, at Red Hat, where I serve as president and CEO, we have at least three associates who are so passionate about our company’s role in changing the world through open source technology that they have gotten a tattoo of “Shadowman,” the icon wearing a red fedora in our company logo. How many companies can say the same? That’s a level of permanence and sense of mission that no economist could ever have predicted with a chart.

Besides having no management theory for how to foster a “Shadowman tattoo” kind of passion, the other problem that surfaces is that the many executives I speak with still confuse engagement with morale, job satisfaction, and even happiness. Engagement isn’t about being happy. Happy people may or may not be engaged in the business.

When I was the chief operating officer at Delta Air Lines, I remember once being asked, “What are you going to do about our morale?” My answer? “Nothing.” Morale is an output of many things. If a workforce believes in and is passionate about their purpose, has the tools they need to do their work well, and is engaged in what they are trying to accomplish, then they’ll most likely have high morale. But if morale is low, then you should focus on your organization’s purpose, on tools, and on building engagement. Directly trying to make people happy is treating the symptoms, not the cause.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Jim Whitehurst is the president and CEO of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT products and solutions, and the author of the book The Open Organization (HBR Press, 2015). Follow him on Twitter at @JWhitehurst.