ABSTRACT
Perverse pride, organisationally speaking, is that state of arrogance that leads organisation members collectively to ignore some of the realities that surround and perhaps threaten them. For psychoanalysts, pride begins with the body: what it is and what it is able to produce. An infant will take pride in mastery of movement and in its capacity to communicate. Pride begins when the child is able to see his own accomplishments, abilities or qualities as valued in the eyes of important others. Pride and shame can be seen as integrally linked to the development of the psyche within the social and communal context. The culture of pride that had been internalised by the Bonds arbitrage group at Salomon’s was intensified in the short life of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The LTCM principals and traders came of age in the Wall Street tradition of machismo demonstrated through clever and successful trading; always being one up on someone else.
