Seminar – Harnessing Passion for Competitive Advantage: Conceptualising Work Passion as a Strategic Resource

Dr Wesley Helms, Brock University

How do firms utilise the passion of their workforce to attain competitive advantage? This research engages in an inductive study of how actors within Ontario’s successful fine wineries work with their and other’s passion to differentiate their wines. Drawing from these findings that 1) winery leaders reported work passion for three domains of the practice of fine wine making and 2) that the expression of these work passions created interactive, “hands-on” work cycles in which they publicly espoused work passion in manners that attracted and retained work passionate employees as well as socialised their work passions towards ensuring that the strategic capabilities underlying their differentiation were resilient. Subsequently, the study proposes a resource-based model of leadership passion harnessing and conduct a supplementary analysis on the expression of passion by 117 Ontario’s fine-wineries’ leaders through their mission statements and the differentiation of their wines over seven years’ of wine contests. Those wineries that expressed passion for our three domains were more likely to differentiate their wines over those that did not, particularly those facing barriers to resources. As managers have increasingly argued that their, and their workforce’s, work passion is a resource our study suggests that whether it leads to competitive advantage is shaped by whether leadership express it towards those practices they share with their employees.

Speaker bio

Dr Wesley Helms received his PhD from the Schulich School of Business at York University in 2011. Dr Helms’s research interests are on how new and sometimes contested practices become increasingly accepted by key audiences. In particular, the strategic actions that actors take on behalf of those practices they care about and whether those actions shape the meaning of, and spread, those practices. His research has covered the practices of corporate social responsibility, mixed martial arts, Ontario fine winemaking – and most recently, the emerging practices of social enterprises.