Lingjiang Zhao Haishen Huang ^*

• South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

The pursuit of perfection has become a common job requirement for modern organizations against the backdrop of increasingly fierce market competition. Drawing upon appraisal theory of emotion, we develop and test a model delineating the paradoxical role that leader perfectionism plays in predicting employee's job performance. Specifically, we propose that leader perfectionism improves job performance through increased harmonious work passion and simultaneously hinders it through enhanced performance pressure. We further propose self-efficacy as boundary condition, such that the positive path through harmonious work passion is stronger and the negative path through performance pressure is weaker for individuals with higher (vs. lower) levels of self-efficacy. Finding from a three-wave and multisource field study provides support for our hypothesized predictions. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications of this study.1 Considering the dualistic model of work passion (Vallerand et al., 2003), leader perfectionism's pursuit of performance will form a performance climate and then lead to obsessive work passion (Zhang et al., 2022). However, extant research show no direct or indirect relationship between obsessive work passion and performance (e.g. Ho et al., 2011;Marina N Astakhova and Gayle Porter, 2015;Pollack et al., 2020), implying that obsessive work passion may not be the mediator of the negative pathway between leader perfectionism and employees' job performance. In view of great attention of performance from leader perfectionism (Guo et al., 2020), we suppose performance pressurerather than obsessive work passion -serve as the mediator for negative pathway.