What's interesting, though, is that when you scroll back a few links on the same site, they reference a survey that showed 82% are not passionate about their work.

http://blog.rypple.com/2010/10/82-arent-passionate-about-the...

Bolsters the argument that passion comes more from inside, not from external validation.

There are other reasons for people to not be passionate about their job. That said, having a boss who doesn't respect you can seriously sap your motivation.

At amazon, I got stuck adding features to software that had already been deprecated... three years before I joined.

Not only was I not passionate about that, but since it was the first time I'd encountered code with lower quality and even more antiquated technology than what I'd found in government contracting, I was truly contemptuous about what I was doing.

If you get stuck with work that doesn't require ANY of the skills that the interviewers grill you for, it's hard to care about your job, let alone be passionate about it.

Remember, this survey is more about self-validation than what bosses actually think about their employees. I would theorize that most employees give their boss the benefit of the doubt, since it would be very difficult to get through the day otherwise. If you know with enough certainty that your boss does not respect you to admit it to yourself and to a survey, she or he must have been very obviously disrespectful, or the employee must be completely paranoid. I'd be more interested in the boss's opinion, really.

And the statistic that 86% trust their boss combined with the 91% think their boss trusts them means that 4-5% think they're getting away with something.

In a thriving economy this would be the norm - if your boss disrespects you, you change bosses.

and in a down economy, if your boss doesn't respect you (and s/he isn't completely loony) s/he fires you and finds someone better.

The other 9% are self-employed.

I love how the wording in the title implies a "Fools!".

A bully/psychopathic/sociopathic boss can kill a passion for excellence in any job in a matter of a few work days.

It's a huge task to completely take control of what things motivate you even when you are being punished for good behavior, and rewarded for bad behavior. There are managers who actually damage the team and prevent work from occurring. Sometimes they know full well what they are doing, destroying the entire team as a vendetta for another reason. Psychopaths and sociopaths are all around us, some of them are high achievers. Career damaging blackmail, and passive aggression are likely to hit hard with these people.

Actually, I'd go so far as to say that they're usually high achievers, to the point of being pathological. Their egos are so wound up in doing things that they discourage people from suggesting that they do otherwise.