What personality trait rules? -thoughts on Grit
In a world hungry for simple answers not even the field of psychology is spared. Hey, positive psychology might even be one of the most affected fields to quick answers.
Angela Duckworth originated the concept of "grit".
Grit has been presented as a higher order personality that is highly predictive of both success and performance. Grit is also often used by entrepreneurs saying that if you only work hard and persistent, you will succeed. Discussing whether that is true is not for here and, may I say, highly irrelevant. Since grit and persistence are chunks/definitions of personality traits, which in it´s turn are genetic. So giving the advice to "work hard and be persistent" is quite a useless advice. Since you either got it or not.
Back to grit. Grit is a construct with two lower facets: "perseverance of effort" and" consistency of interest". Being promoted as THE trait to predict success and performance.
Credé, Tynan and Harms (2016) conducted a meta analysis in order to check for the validity of the statement. Based on 585 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals they concluded that the higher structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, but that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness.
Correlations between conscientiousness and grit are as high as p=.97 (N=1,554) and the lowest presented at p=.80 (N=1,308). High correlations like this have led some to suggest that grit should be considered a facet of conscientiousness.
The Five Factor Model is there for a reason, and with what we know today, will take you all the way.
At NGr we stick with the FFM and our algorithms will evaluate your candidate and based on standards deviation scales let you know if your candidate will perform better or worse compared to it´s peers connected to a monetary value.
Who needs grit?
