Despite the pervasive use of pride as a motivational tool in organizations, little is known about the effects of pride experience on work performance. This paper investigates how pride affects performance at creative tasks compared to other positive emotions. Although pride has been linked to increased perseverance (Williams & DeSteno, 2008), I hypothesize that experiencing pride can lead to less persistence on unrelated creativity task because by affirming one's self-worth, feeling pride satisfies the need to prove one's value and reduces the perceived importance of the task. Study 1 found that people high in trait pride significantly persisted less on unsolvable anagram tasks than people low in trait pride. Study 2 found that people who experienced state pride persisted less on a brainstorming task compared to people feeling compassion and amusement. Study 3 examined if the negative relationship between pride and persistence holds even when the task is threatening to one's pride so its importance cannot be trivialized. Under low threat, people feeling pride persisted less than people feeling amused, but under high threat, people feeling pride persisted significantly more than those feeling amused. These studies demonstrate that pride doesn't always enhance persistence and therefore managers should frame a task as being relevant and threatening to the employee's pride when using pride to promote performance.

Entrepreneurial pitches are anxiety-provoking and pivotal for the success of the venture. Despite a wealth of research indicating that early-stage investors attend to entrepreneurs’ emotions, little research focuses on how entrepreneurs themselves can manage their emotions to improve their pitches. I investigate how entrepreneurs can manage anxiety prior to pitches by acknowledging the anxiety and linking it to their entrepreneurial passion. I theorize that interpreting anxiety as a reflection of one’s passion for the venture increases the momentary feeling of passion, facilitates expressions of passion during pitches, and increases persuasiveness. I also propose that linking anxiety to passion should be easier and more realistic than calming down, which people are often advised to do. Results from a field survey and two randomizedexperiments support the theory. The findings offer insights for how entrepreneurs can mentally reframe their seemingly detrimental emotional experiences for beneficial outcomes in terms of their persuasiveness and judges’ ratings of their pitch. This work also contributes to emotion regulation research by comparing the effects of different coping mechanisms for pre-pitch anxiety, unpacking the ways to reappraise stressful situations, and demonstrating the utility of fostering beneficial emotions and not just repairing negative ones.