Grit (effortful persistence) can be measured with a short scale, shows little variation across socio-demographic subgroups, and is associated with career success and career engagement

Abstract

Grit (effortful persistence) has received considerable attention as a personality trait relevant for success and performance. However, critics have questioned grit’s construct validity and criterion validity. Here we report on two studies that contribute to the debate surrounding the grit construct. Study 1 (N = 6,230) examined the psychometric properties of a five-item grit scale, covering mainly the perseverance facet, in a large and representative sample of German adults. Moreover, it investigated the distribution of grit across sociodemographic subgroups (age groups, genders, educational strata, employment statuses). Multiple-group measurement models demonstrated that grit showed full metric, but only partial scalar, invariance across all sociodemographic subgroups. Sociodemographic differences in the levels of grit emerged for age, education, and employment status but were generally small. Study 2 investigated how grit relates to career success (income, job prestige, job satisfaction) and career engagement (working overtime, participation in continuing professional development courses, attitudes toward lifelong learning) in an employed subsample (n = 2,246). When modeled as a first-order factor, grit was incrementally associated with all indicators of career success and especially of career engagement (.08 ≤ β ≤ .75)—over and above cognitive ability and sociodemographic characteristics. When modeled as a residual facet of conscientiousness, grit largely retained its criterion validity for success but only partly for engagement (–.14 ≤ β ≤ .61). Our findings offer qualified support for the psychometric quality of the short grit scale and suggest that grit may provide some added value in predicting career outcomes. We critically discuss these findings while highlighting that grit hardly differs from established facets of conscientiousness such as industriousness/perseverance.

New wine in an old bottle? A facet-level perspective on the added value of Grit over BFI–2 Conscientiousness

“…On the one hand, numerous studies have supported the predictive validity of Grit, particularly in relation to academic outcomes [1,2,11,[28][29][30][31]. In addition, some studies have suggested Grit's incremental predictive validity over Conscientiousness for other domains such as career success, career engagement, and exercise behavior [10,[32][33][34][35]. On the other hand, a substantial number of studies found that Grit did not have any incremental predictive validity over Conscientiousness for a number of achievement outcomes such as GPA [7,12,13,[36][37][38][39].…”

“…Income and crystalized intelligence (i.e., acquired knowledge) are likely to be the result of continued investment of time and effort. It is this type of success measure that most research on Grit has focused on (e.g., [1,10,32]). Whereas the positive relationships of Conscientiousness with income are well established [41][42][43], only few studies have investigated relationship between Grit and income, but the few studies that did generally found positive associations.…”

“…Whereas the positive relationships of Conscientiousness with income are well established [41][42][43], only few studies have investigated relationship between Grit and income, but the few studies that did generally found positive associations. For example Lechner et al [10] found that grit was positively related to income even after controlling for Conscientiousness. Similarly, Danner et al [44] found that Grit was linked to a higher income in most (but not all) of the 19 countries they studied.…”

“…Hence, there is reason to believe that Grit is one of the prerequisites for earning a higher income. To the best of our knowledge, there is only one prior study testing the relationship between Grit and crystallized intelligence showing weak relationships [10] and the findings on the relationship between facets of Conscientiousness and crystallized intelligence vary substantially [45,46]. To address this lacuna, we included a measure to assess crystallized intelligence in our study and investigated the relationships on the facet level for the first time.…”

“…At the same time, critics have questioned the conceptual distinctness of Grit from the Big Five domain of Conscientiousness (i.e., the disposition to be organized, productive, and responsible), a construct well known for its utility to predict academic achievement as well [5]; and cast doubt on the alleged predictive power of Grit in relation to performance criteria [6,7]. In addition, the close relationship between Grit and various measures of Conscientiousness has been discussed conceptually as well as empirically (e.g., [2,[7][8][9][10]).…”