Pride

The widely-used firm Kenexa uses pride as one of their core elements in assessing and scoring employee engagement. Their Employee Engagement Index measures the attitude an employee has towards its company, probing on affect (question 1), behaviour (4), and cognition (2 and 3 below):

1. I am proud to tell people I work for my company.
2. Overall, I am extremely satisfied with my company as a place to work.
3. I would recommend this place to others as a good place to work.
4. I rarely think about looking for a new job with another company.

Pride covaries with gains in status and rank relative to others (Shariff; Tracy); its expression includes a small smile, with head tilted slightly back, visibly expanded posture, and arms raised above the head or hands on hips (Tracy; Robins) "a very similar symbol to mammalian displays of dominance".

A paper published by Christopher Oveis and E.J. Horberg and Dacher Keltner in the April edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concludes that pride is "associated with the tendency to view oneself as more different from the most vulnerable groups and more similar to the strongest groups." This can help explain how engagement follows employee agreement and disagreement to Sr Management decisions.

The study also found that an enhanced sense of similarity to the weaker others associated with compassion. Maybe part of the business appeal of having a highly engaged organisation is, to this finding, that it is not feeble-friendly.