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Many company slogans and mantras profess that passion is part of the way they work and that it is important to them. Passion over the centuries has been defined as something that makes humans slaves to their emotions and exerts an almost overwhelming compulsion to participate in an activity or relationship. In a profession such as consultant civil engineering that is so strongly anchored in the objective and scientific, what place has a motivator such as passion?

This research takes a sample of consultant civil engineers and assesses two types of passion, harmonious passion and obsessive passion, and secondly measures their job performance. It was found amongst the engineers sampled that those who were more obsessively passionate achieved higher performance levels across the items measured and those who were more harmoniously passionate had little to no relationship with the performance items measured.

This suggests that obsessive passion has a relationship with various performance indicators related to consultant civil engineers and contributes to the knowledge gap of there being no research carried out with respect to passion and construction professionals.

Trevor Cadieux is a Civil Engineering graduate from the North of England. He has an advanced degree in Construction Management and experience as a Consultant Engineer in the UK and Australia.

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