What little research that has been done on this question focuses on how having a calling orientation or a job orientation affects a person’s actual job performance. Those findings show that calling-oriented employees do tend to spend more time and effort at work; however, they can often be overly idealistic rather than effective, and they can be critical of organizational practices in ways that don’t lead to success. In other words, if you do what you love, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you do it well.

But in our recent research, Yuna Cho of the University of Hong Kong and I found evidence that calling-oriented employees nevertheless do actually tend to achieve higher pay and organizational status. So if they’re not necessarily doing a better job, why are these professionals more successful? Our research indicated that it’s because managers tend to be biased toward those with a calling orientation.

That has critical implications for managers, who need to check themselves for this bias. Ignoring it could result in lower employee morale (as job-oriented team members see a calling-oriented colleague receiving preferential treatment), the promotion of underqualified candidates, and the encouragement of inauthentic displays of passion for the job. It also suggests that professionals themselves need to adjust their view of having a sense of calling or passion for work as a requisite for success — despite all the attention being paid to professional purpose and passion these days.

The Benefits of a Calling

My co-author and I suspected that managers might be misperceiving calling-oriented employees’ levels of performance and their likelihood of staying at the organization for the long haul and that this in turn might affect how the managers decided to reward those employees.

Our hypotheses were based on a number of theories and principles from psychology and sociology. What psychologists call signaling theory suggests that managers would likely make their decisions based on observable actions when they do not have complete information about their employees’ unobservable traits. Because calling-oriented employees tend to volunteer to perform extra tasks, managers might extrapolate these signals to see them as more self-driven, hardworking, and committed. Availability bias can reinforce this by predisposing managers to judge employee performance and commitment based on easily available information rather than a detailed assessment on output or results. Finally, reciprocity, or the sense of obligation to reward good deeds, is a moral and social norm, but by adhering to it without adequate information managers can end up rewarding “good” behaviors that don’t actually benefit the company.

Two studies we conducted support our hypotheses. In the first, we tapped the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), a long-term data collection effort that measures life outcomes in a random sample of Wisconsin high school graduates from 1957.

Participants of the study were surveyed on their work orientation in 2004. Among the 1,077 respondents to this survey, 49% identified as having a calling orientation, 35% identified as having a job orientation, and 16% said they worked primarily for career advancement.

After controlling for demographic, socioeconomic and employment-related characteristics, we found that those who had found their calling at work tended to earn more than those who worked for compensation or status.