People Who Love Their Jobs Are Physically Healthier, And Job Satisfaction Has Little to Do With It
Most employee surveys revolve around a familiar metric: satisfaction. Are people content with their compensation? Do they find their schedules manageable? Do they approve of their supervisor? Yet new research from scholars across seven Canadian universities suggests that satisfaction may be an incomplete proxy for what truly matters. A deeper construct—“love of the job”—appears to be a substantially stronger predictor of physical health and long-term psychological well-being.
Across eight studies involving more than 1,800 workers, researchers found that employees who genuinely love their jobs report better overall physical health, take fewer sick days, and experience lower levels of anxiety and depression. When compared directly against job satisfaction, work engagement, and general positive mood, love of the job (LOJ) emerged as the most powerful predictor of physical health. Importantly, this relationship held even after statistically controlling for the other variables.
For anyone who has ever questioned whether an annual engagement survey captures something meaningful, that finding is consequential.
What “Love of the Job” Actually Means
The research team, led by Michelle Inness at the University of Alberta, grounded their framework in Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love—a model originally developed to explain romantic relationships. Sternberg’s theory identifies three core components of consummate love: passion, intimacy, and commitment.
Translated into the workplace, these become:
Passion for daily work tasks
Intimacy, defined as genuine trust and closeness with coworkers
Commitment to the organization
All three dimensions must be present simultaneously. An employee who enjoys the tasks but feels socially disconnected, or one who values colleagues but feels detached from the organization’s mission, would not qualify as experiencing full LOJ. It is the integrated presence of passion, relational closeness, and organizational commitment that differentiates job love from conventional constructs like satisfaction or engagement.
By contrast, job satisfaction functions more like a cognitive evaluation: Does the job meet expectations? Is compensation equitable? Are working conditions acceptable? Love of the job is qualitatively different. It represents an ongoing emotional attachment rather than a periodic assessment of adequacy.
Study Design and Measurement
Developing a valid LOJ scale required multiple rounds of expert review and empirical testing across independent samples in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Participants represented sectors including healthcare, finance, retail, and government.
The final nine-item scale included statements such as:
“My work is more than a job to me; it is a passion.”
“I love the people I work with.”
“This organization has a great deal of personal meaning for me.”
One particularly compelling component of the research—published in Human Resource Management—tracked 124 employees over a five-year period. Workers reporting higher LOJ at the five-year mark were significantly less likely to be contemplating departure, even after controlling for satisfaction and engagement levels.
Across studies and time frames, higher LOJ scores were also associated with lower self-reported anxiety and depression.
Health Outcomes and Behavioral Effects
When examining physical health indicators—including sleep disturbances, headaches, gastrointestinal complaints, and susceptibility to illness—LOJ was the strongest predictor among all tested variables. It outperformed job satisfaction, engagement, and general positive affect.
Behaviorally, employees high in job love demonstrated:
Lower chronic lateness
Fewer extended breaks
Reduced early departures
Notably, high LOJ did not correlate with increased workaholism or unethical behavior. Strong attachment to work did not appear, at typical levels, to produce compulsive overwork or moral compromise.
However, the authors acknowledge a potential risk at the extreme end. Individuals with excessively intense job love may tolerate poor treatment, overlook systemic problems, or remain in unhealthy environments longer than advisable. The researchers refer to this dynamic as “weaponized passion,” where organizations may implicitly leverage employees’ emotional investment to extract disproportionate effort. While the current findings do not resolve this tension, they underscore its relevance.
Limitations
Several methodological constraints temper the conclusions:
All outcomes were self-reported; objective health or attendance records were not used.
Although time-separated surveys were employed to reduce common-method bias, causal direction remains uncertain. Better health may increase job love rather than the reverse.
Samples consisted largely of full-time, English-speaking workers recruited online, limiting generalizability to gig, seasonal, part-time, or culturally distinct labor populations.
Funding and Publication
Funding was provided by the Alberta School of Business, the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business, the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
The study, titled “Love of the Job: What It Is, How to Measure It, and Why It Matters for Work Outcomes,” was published in 2026 in Human Resource Management (Wiley Periodicals LLC) under an open-access Creative Commons Attribution License.
The central implication is difficult to ignore: truly loving one’s job—across the work itself, the relationships within it, and the organization behind it—appears to confer measurable advantages for both psychological and physical health. Whether organizations can intentionally cultivate this state, or whether it emerges from specific structural and cultural conditions, remains an open empirical question.