It’s popular advice for new graduates: “Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Love for one’s work, Americans are often told, is the surest route to success.

As a management professor, I can attest that there is solid research supporting this advice. In psychology, this idea is described as “intrinsic motivation” – working because you find the work itself satisfying. People who are intrinsically motivated tend to experience genuine enjoyment and curiosity in what they do, relishing opportunities to learn or master challenges for their own sake. Research has long shown that intrinsic motivation enhances performance, persistence and creativity at work.

Yet my and my co-authors’ recent research suggests that this seemingly innocent idea of loving your work can take on a moral edge. Increasingly, people seem to judge both themselves and others according to whether they are intrinsically motivated. What used to be a personal preference has, for many, become a moral imperative: You should love your work, and it is somehow wrong if you don’t.

When a neutral preference becomes charged with moral meaning, social scientists call it “moralization.” For example, someone might initially choose........

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