It’s a Matter of Organizational Pride: How Perceptions of Organizational Virtuousness and Competence Affect Employee Behaviors

Companies often discuss the importance of organizational pride and what they believe leads to it, yet research on this topic in the organizational sciences has not kept pace. Our paper narrows this research-practice gap by identifying important antecedents and consequences of organizational pride. To do so, we build theory on the nature of organizational pride as an important workplace attitude by explaining how it carries prescriptive implications in addition to evaluative properties, which provides new insights into how it operates. Empirically, we demonstrate in an experiment and a field study how employee perceptions of their organization’s virtuousness and competence affect their level of pride toward the organization, which subsequently impacts their task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the implications and future research avenues.