I've got a friend. Let's call her Sarah. She called me up a couple of years ago, agonizing about a job she'd been offered. It was a global role, located in a country she really wanted to live in. The company were prepared to relocate her, to pick up the private school fees, to meet every demand she had about the job. And yet she was couldn't take it. 'I just can't bear the idea of sending out emails attaching my name to this organization; I could never feel proud of working there' she said to me. 'In fact I think I'd feel embarrassed and defensive about it.'
Quite rightly she turned the job down.
If you can't feel proud of where you work, it will be very tough to put effort in and there'll always be something you'll hold back. And when you hold back you don't perform at your best, nor are you as happy as you could be at work.
But pride in an organization is something that's poorly understood by most bosses. Nor is there much research about it.
Let's back track for a moment and think about pride because it's got a pretty mixed reputation: on the one hand it's thought to be a bad thing, one of the seven deadly sins. And most religions tell us that pride can only lead to downfall. That's when it's connected to arrogance and conceit and known as "hubristic" pride. On the other there's pride in a job well done, in effort put in, which is thought to be a good thing. As is pride in a team's effort, in an organization's achievement. Both of these are associated with what's called "authentic pride".
Pride is what's called a "self-conscious" emotion like shame or guilt. All three of them require complex self-evaluative processes to experience them. For example you need to decide if you like yourself and if you feel worthy compared to others in a certain context. That means self-conscious emotions involve a lot of self stuff, like self-consciousness, self-awareness and self-esteem. But when you do feel pride, you feel greater social worth, and in turn higher self-esteem. In other words pride helps you feel good.
But where does it all come from?
Naturally pride is associated with personality. People who tend to feel authentic pride in their achievements are more likely to score high on extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. And it's no surprise to find out that those with narcissistic personality disorder are known to feel hubristic pride.
Authentic pride is also associated an internal locus of control, the sense that you affect events and outcomes by your own actions and behavior. People with a high external locus of control think that things happen to them because of fate or powerful others. And research has found that people who have authentic feelings of pride see hard work as the key to success in life but those who are more huristic in outlook, see success as something predetermined.
Authentic pride most often arises when you can see you've been part of a spectacular effort which produce amazing results. And when you feel you work for a prestigious organization that contributes to world in a manner that matters to you, that resonates with what you value, you'll feel proud. So pride exists in what you do and who you do it for, or in a small and a larger sense.
And that's what most organizations would love to foster because frankly it's priceless. Literally.
That's because pride is a catalyst for focussing on task, effort, and persistence. And it spurs us on to help others, creating powerful and uplifting feelings of connectedness and belonging, all of which build happiness at work. Best of all, employees are most likely to experience this pleasant emotion while doing something their organization values, like performing well on core tasks.
In other words organizational pride is a win-win for everyone. So it's extraordinary to me that something which has such tremendous outcomes, gets so little attention from leaders, managers and share-holders alike.
