I've got to disagree with you on the last one. Personally, I'd rather work with a developer (and hire, should I ever end up in such a position) someone who writes code because it's what they love to do first and because it happens to pay the bills second. Profit motive is powerful, but I'd argue that doing what you love beats all else.
I read a study once that found greater financial incentives are correlated with lower quality of work (might have been productivity), but I can't seem to mumble the right google incantation to bring it up again. I'll post it here if I come across it.
I agree that passion is valuable, but expect me to be passionate about coding and solving problems, please don't expect me to be passionate about your company before I even fully understand who you are and what you're doing.
Passion for continuous improvement is important as well.
Passion is a double edged sword. I've known people who were passionate and misguided. Their passion to propagate their misguided viewpoint was a drain on the team and caused much drama.
There's also the case of the passionate but incompetent. I'm not sure if this is what you're talking about, but I can think of one person I worked with who had the best of intentions and was highly motivated but was just utterly, hopelessly incompetent.
For quite many companies there are people who are passionate about that company and their goals even if they don't [yet] work there. E.g., some high-profile programmer posts about Oculus Rift impled that, and there are many niche-cases for specific business areas.
If you don't understand what the company is and what they're doing, then it's reasonable that you'll be at a disadvantage compared to people who did understand all that before applying for the job and likely applied because of that.
I've always done research, but there's usually a lot of hugely relevant information that's not going to be very publicly available. Oculus is a bad example - most companies are not high profile, in a space with few other significant players that has been romanticized by sci-fi media for decades. Of course, there are always going to be idiots blindly excited by what they imagine, but those aren't the good hires - the best hires learn what they can, then pick the best option, then pursue it passionately.
The research you're looking for is probably from Daniel Pink. He found that for creative tasks, higher financial incentives led to lower quality output. For routine, standardized tasks, financial incentives work well.
Is this what you were looking for? [1] When looking at a financial reward as a motive for great work, a study found this works great for work that is very monotonous/tedious, and horrible for work that requires a lot of thinking. In fact, when offered larger and larger rewards based on better work for the more mentally strenuous work, the quality of work seemed to go down.
I read a study once that found greater financial incentives are correlated with lower quality of work (might have been productivity), but I can't seem to mumble the right google incantation to bring it up again. I'll post it here if I come across it.