Pride can also lead to greater effort (as well as to gigantic signatures).In an elegant paper looking into the performance of German fighter pilots in the second world war, Philipp Ager of the University of Mannheim and other researchers found that personal rivalry fuelled risk-taking behaviour.When pilots received public recognition for their exploits in a daily bulletin to the German armed forces, peers with whom they had flown in the past redoubled their own efforts.Something propelled them to fly more missions, even though that meant a greater chance of being killed, and it wasn’t humility.Patience may be a virtue, but it is not always the best quality in a leader.Research on the impact of managers’ moods on performance is pretty thin: one deeply unpersuasive paper from 2017 used facial-recognition software to analyse CEOs’ TV appearances and concluded that expressions of anger and fear were associated with improved profitability in the following quarter.Yet forbearance can plainly go too far.Anyone who has worked in an office knows that the boss’s wrath can sometimes be the only thing that gets things moving.Greed is not something to admit to in polite society but acquisitiveness still motivates an awful lot of people.
