Dream or Dreamless Job? the Relationship Between Harmonious and Obsessive Passion for Work, Private Life and Insomnia in Academics During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Passion is defined as the love an individual feels for an activity considered important. Vallerand et al.'s (2003) dualistic model of passion states that depending on how the activity is internalized in the individual's identity, it is possible to live a harmonious or obsessive passion. The first is characterized by a strong engagement in the activity that is in harmony with other aspects of the person's life, the second by intrapersonal or interpersonal pressures that lead the individual to compulsively engage in the activity, resulting in conflicts with other elements of life. The model can be applied to the work experience and can explain workers' perceptions of well-being or stress (Lavigne et al., 2012). From this perspective, understanding the role of the two types of passion in academic workers, a profession characterized by high levels of dedication and engagement, is a key element in understanding how this propensity affected their well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the relationship between passion for work and both work-family conflict (WFC) and insomnia was considered. In addition, the buffering effect of detachment was explored to identify recovery strategies that may protect against negative consequences. The study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and involved 1119 participants (54.8% male) from 11 different universities. All participants completed an online questionnaire after providing informed consent. SPSS 27 and Mplus 8 software were used to conduct the analyses. The structural equation model showed a good fit to the data [χ 2 (92)=267.01, p<0.001, RMSEA=0.04, CFI=0.98, TLI=0.97, SRMR=0.03]. According to the results, harmonious and obsessive passion for work showed a negative and positive relationship with WFC, respectively, which in turn was positively related to insomnia. The significant indirect effect was negative for harmonious passion and positive for obsessive passion. In addition, detachment also showed a negative indirect effect on insomnia. The moderation of detachment in the association between passion for work and WFC was significant and positive only in the case of harmonious passion. In the analyses, we controlled for gender and role. Although the study involved a large sample of academics, it has the limitation that a crosssectional design and self-reported data were used, which precluded the possibility of drawing conclusions about causal effects and increased the likelihood of common method variance effects.