Self-Doubt Goeth Before the Pride

In a two-week experience sampling study of 328 employees from a wide range of jobs and organizations, we find that the extent to which employees experience self-doubt at the start of the workday shapes the emotions they experience at the end of the workday. On days when they made substantial task progress, employees who had experienced more self-doubt felt more relief but also more pride than those who had experienced less self-doubt. We interpret pride as both a response to achievement and a trigger that initiates a process of self-restoration. Consistent with these interpretations, we also find that pride is positively associated with self-restorative attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. On days when employees feel more pride, they experience a larger boost in self-evaluations (i.e., self-efficacy and self-esteem) and are more likely to engage in self-expanding job crafting behaviors at work. These findings, related to mostly ordinary task accomplishment in the workplace, closely track those of the first author’s qualitative interview study (discussed only briefly here) of employees’ responses to mostly major pride-eliciting achievements. Thus, we are confident that our results generalize across many different types of tasks and projects in many different kinds of workplaces.