People see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra: study

I'm not being argumentative here; I just want to point out that Not everyone is Brilliant and Extraordinary, at least Not in their job. On the other hand--some people are.

On a personally note: a huge deciding factor in my getting out of a family business was due to an association that my late father had with a competitor. Yes he was much older, and of course more experienced, but I knew I could not compete with him. Period, end of story.

Furthermore, from the ten years I did run that business (and successfully by most metrics), I also met other people who ran other types of businesses, that were also just ridiculously talented at their work. People like that have almost a Sixth Sense about what to do, and what not to do and when to do it. I may have that in certain arenas, But I did not posses it in that family business.

If you know someone who loves painting and a mural needs to be painted on Saturday, is it really crazy to think it's less bad to ask them to paint the mural than it would be to ask someone who has no passion for it at all? The question is not "Would you prefer a world in which we ignored the differences in passion and decided to never exploit anyone at all?", the questions is "Which is worse?". It does not say anything at all about whether people think these things are OK. If I tell you killing one person is less bad than killing two, that doesn’t mean I think killing people is OK.

"Participants read about a Ph.D. student’s working relationship with their graduate advisor. Those who read a scenario in which the student was being exploited – verbally abused and given unreasonable deadlines – rated the student as likely to be more passionate than students who weren’t being exploited."

Isn't that true though? If there's an identical distribution of passion across advisors at the start of the program and passion is negatively correlated with deciding to drop out in response to an exploitative advisor, people with exploitative advisors are therefore likely to be (although may not individually be) more passionate. It's essentially just asking if passionate people are more likely to continue towards a goal even in an exploitative environment, and has nothing to do with whether that is a good thing.

Not in the real world.

1. Like in any organization, the boss exploits the workers he doesn't like more than those he likes. Who he likes might be based a random factor like sense of humor/gender than ability.

2. People rarely drop out of phd programs (single digit percentage at most in my experience) because they don't want to fail. So, in actuality, the drop out rate difference exploitative advisors and good ones is too small to be significant.

3. Somewhat contrary to point 1., passionate students are usually better than uninspired students, and so passionate students usually have more leverage than the uninspired. They can switch advisors or schools - making the advisor look bad. In my experience the exploited ones are usually those who are in the bottom half of ability.

4. Its very difficult for advisors to "fire" a student usually. It reflects badly on them, and they usually have to go through a painful review process with the university to explain why the student was asked to leave. Therefore, advisors will usually treat horribly the students they don't like so they leave on their own accord.