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Think passion only has a place in edgy Silicon Valley startups? Think again. A dearth of worker passion is harming corporate performance and competitiveness.

To address perpetually mounting competitive pressures, organizations need workers who bring passion to their jobs to navigate challenges and accelerate performance improvement. Yet only 11 percent of U.S. workers surveyed by Deloitte possess the attributes that lead to accelerated learning and performance improvement. These and other insights are highlighted in Unlocking the Passion of the Explorer, a report from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge.

The effect of mounting competitive pressure is visible in the downward trend in return on assets (ROA). According to Deloitte, ROA for U.S. organizations has been declining for the past 47 years, despite gains in labor productivity. The data suggests that the typical corporate response of reducing costs and squeezing more productivity out of the remaining workers by making them work harder is not a long-term solution to competitive pressures.

Recruiting wars have typically focused on finding particular skills, but Deloitte uncovered that many modern work skills become outdated within five years or so. Instead of recruiting skill sets, organizations would be better served by recruiting passionate people and fostering passion in existing workers. However, the passion of the explorer—workers who embrace challenges as opportunities to learn new skills and rapidly improve performance—is rare in the U.S. workforce, and outdated practices and structures are to blame.

Many organizations squelch rather than cultivate the passion of the explorer. In the fall of 2012, Deloitte Center for the Edge surveyed approximately 3,000 full-time U.S. workers (more than 30 hours per week) from 15 industries and across various job levels to measure their levels of passion.

The survey notes that one of the fundamental considerations for any business leader is how to create a passionate employee population. Recruiting employees with passion and creating work environments that foster this elusive characteristic will help enterprises effectively respond to the diverse challenges of a globalized marketplace. Workers who demonstrate passion are more committed to their employers and are more likely to see new opportunities for success. In fact, 79 percent of workers who demonstrate the most robust passion say they already work for their “dream” organization even if they are not currently in their dream work role.

While only a small minority of U.S. employees possess the passion of the explorer, 45 percent demonstrate one or two of the three attributes necessary to build passion: long-term commitment to a specific domain (those who maintain long-range goals and perspective, despite short-term disruption), questing disposition (those who embrace challenges as opportunities to learn and get stronger), and connecting disposition (those who seek to build strong, trust-based relationships essential for collaboration and rapid feedback). Individuals with any of these characteristics are important to organizations since these attributes can provide a foundation for cultivating the passion that drives accelerated learning and sustained high performance. Creative approaches to work environment redesign can help to catalyze and amplify the passion of the explorer among employees. Executives should not view passion as a given quantity, but rather as something that can be nurtured and expanded over time.

Interestingly, these characteristics are not equally distributed across the workforce. The passionate tend to work for smaller organizations, and the prevalence of workers with the passion of the explorer drops, from 13 to 9 percent, in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. The research revealed that differences in the level of passion across industries were not statistically significant.

Moreover, the most passionate workers are likely to be in the management and marketing functions (17 percent and 16 percent, respectively) and they are least likely to reside within the customer service (5 percent), accounting/finance (7 percent), human resources (7 percent), or manufacturing (7 percent) areas.

Furthermore, the survey notes that passion of the explorer correlates with compensation. Higher pay brackets have a higher concentration of passion; among those making more than $150,000, 44 percent are passionate versus just 15 percent or fewer in lower income brackets.

John Hagel, a director with Deloitte Consulting LLP and co-chair of the Center for the Edge, discusses the research findings, and the power of passion to drive performance.