Hubristic Pride

The Hubristic Pride Syndrome

 It’s a pathological syndrome and a danger to mankind.  It is beyond the dark triad.

The dark triad is the bottom three of the 10 personality disorders named in the DSM-5.  I prefer the list in the old DSM-3 which included sadism as a disorder. 

Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Pathology make up the dark triad.  Pathology that also called anti social disorder.  Anti social disorder does not mean that you can’t play well with others it means that you are intentionally tripping people for your entertainment.

This material came up when I was discussing annual employee evaluations with a CEO of an engineering company just under a hundred employees.

I proposed that she was the wrong person for the job and that’s she delegate these reviews to her HR person.  She told me she needs to do the evals to gain insight on who is leaving and who is staying.

This engineering company with a highly technical collection of activities that needed to be evaluated failed to ask questions like do you take pride in the work itself. 

Are you proud of the work the people around you were doing.  And are you proud of the company’s reputation.

When a CEO is doing evaluations, it turns out to be a game of withholding information on both parts.

A CEO does not want to disclose he is rationing bonuses and the employee doesn’t want to communicate that they have mobile apps like Indeed and LinkedIn.

For purposes of this article, I wanted to talk about one word; pride.

 I wanted to discuss pride and its multiple meanings taken from material by Tracy and Robbins which is a determination of whether or not a person has authentic pride or hubris pride.

Authentic pride is a dignified sense of accomplishment providing confidence and prestige from long-term status an employee has attained. 

Physically authentic pride manifests itself in a small smile with expanded posture, head tilted back and arms extended.  If treated fairly that employee is unlikely to be actively looking around and are likely to be defending the company. 

Employees with authentic pride could leave but will probably stay.

Hubristic pride on the other hand is arrogant and conceded.  That hubristic pride is aggrandizing narcissism.  Prone to shaming blaming and guilting others.  Hubristic pride is a dominance shortcut.   It is superiority pride that is ego driven.  Hubristic pride driven employees do not have your back.

Employees with hubristic pride may stay but will probably leave.