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

Abstract

There is emerging consensus that Grit's two facets-perseverance of effort and consistency of interest-are best understood as facets of the Big Five dimension of Conscientiousness. However, an in-depth investigation on whether Grit's facet offer any added value over more established facets of Conscientiousness is absent from the literature. In the present study, we investigated whether Grit's facets are empirically distinguishable from three facets of Conscientiousness as conceived in the well-validated Big-Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2), namely, Organization, Responsibility, Productiveness. Moreover, we investigated whether Grit's facets show different (and possibly stronger) associations than the facets of Conscientiousness with a broad set of external criteria (age, educational attainment, monthly income, life satisfaction, mental and physical health, fluid and crystallized intelligence); as well as whether the criterion correlations of Grit's facets are incremental over Conscientiousness. Findings from two latent-variable models in a large and diverse sample (N = 1,244) indicated that the facets of Grit showed moderate to strong relationships related to each other and to the three Conscientiousness facets of the BFI-2 (.41 � r � .94). Grit-Perseverance was almost indistinguishable from the Productiveness facet of Conscientiousness, whereas Grit-Consistency appeared to capture something unique beyond the Conscientiousness facets. The relationships with external criteria of Grit's facets were similar in direction and size to those of the Conscientiousness facets. The results give further purchase to the view that Grit's facets can be subsumed under the Conscientiousness domain.

Personalidad emprendedora, responsabilidad, autocontrol y grit: El lado psicológico del autoempleo

“…We also created a structural equation model to try to model the relationships between the different psychological variables (conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and the eight specific traits defining entrepreneurial personality) and being self-employed or not. We included the variable conscientiousness in the model because, on the one hand, it is one of the variables within the general model of personality that most helps to explain entrepreneurial activity (Zhao et al, 2010), and on the other, it is one of the variables most closely related to grit (Schmidt et al, 2018(Schmidt et al, , 2020. We also included self-control (short term) as an explanatory precursor of grit (long term), because having a certain amount of selfcontrol helps one have high levels of grit (Duckworth & Gross, 2014).…”

“…Other psychological variables must be considered in this regard such as conscientiousness and self-control. Conscientiousness is focused on completing tasks, something that is very important in achieving long-term goals, and it has been shown to be very strongly related to grit (Schmidt et al, 2018(Schmidt et al, , 2020. Self-control, or the regulation of thoughts, feelings and actions when goals that are considered permanent come into conflict with goals that are more gratifying at that moment (Duckworth et al, 2019), is also related to grit (Duckworth & Gross, 2014), as it is logical to think that someone who is passionate and perseveres towards long-term objectives must be capable of rejecting short-term temptations that could interfere with the objectives.…”

Self-Control Outdoes Fluid Reasoning in Explaining Vocational and Academic Performance—But Does It?

“…On the other hand we wanted to shed light on trait self-control, as a popular construct among the socio-emotional skills. This approach is in line with the recent trend toward investigating facets in contrast to broad domains (Mõttus et al, 2017;Schmidt et al, 2020). However, we included a measure to assess conscientiousness to broaden the perspective of the presented research.…”

Specific, situated, intra-individual, dialectical, and open: New avenues to integrate and advance the research on passion for work

“…In contrast, distinguishing between the more specific facets of HP and OP would be much easier to interpret, and possibly helpful in finding out which exact facets account for the correlation among HP and OP. That much insight can be contributed by examining the facet-level relations has been shown by research on constructs related to work passion, including vocational interests (Armstrong & Anthoney, 2009) and conscientiousness, of which grit is a facet (Schmidt, Lechner, & Danner, 2020;Ponnock et al, 2020).…”