“Leisureship”: Impact of pursuing serious leisure on leaders' performance

Abstract

An increasing number of individuals in leadership roles have a serious leisure interest. We develop a theoretical model of how pursuing serious leisure impacts leaders' performance at work. We propose that a serious leisure interest, through its defining characteristics (effort in mastering a skill, perseverance through adversity, a special ethos, a strong identity, a leisure career), can both promote and harm leaders' performance at work and we examine the conditions under which this can happen. Our theory contributes to research on non-work antecedents of leader performance, to the leader identity construction literature, to theories on the work-nonwork interface and to the serious leisure literature.