Paper presented by Yong Jia Yin and Dr Paul Englert during the 9th Aotearoa New Zealand Organisational Psychology and Organisational Behaviour Conference on 27 November, 2020.

1. Yong Jia Yin
Paul Englert
Reconstructing Grit:
Potential for
maladaptively
and the role of
self-efficacy

2. Who are ya'
Yong Jia Yin
Asia Manager
Paul Englert
Managing Director, Asia

3. Grit - The News Headlines
• Grit is defined as the passion and perseverance for long-term
goals, and this includes working strenuously toward challenges
and maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure,
adversity, and plateaus in progress (Duckworth et al., 2007).
• Perseverance of effort
• Consistency of interest
• Upsides of grit in the literature:
• Better job performance
(Dugan et al., 2018)
• Retention in job and marriage
(Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2014)
• Better academic performance
(Duckworth et al., 2007)

4. Grit - The Science
• Is grit just conscientiousness?
(Schmidt et al., 2018)
• While perseverance may add something to
the construct definition, does it add anything
to the criterion validity? (Credé et al., 2017)
• Could too much grit be maladaptive?
(Alaoui & Fons-Rosen, 2016; Lucas et al.,
2015)
• Are there other contributing factors?
(Alhadabi & Karpinski, 2020; Multon et al.,
1991)
All of these questions are important for the
application of Grit within an I/O context

5. The Current Study
The purpose of this study is two-fold:
• To examine if grit is related to the
maladaptive trait of compulsivity and
whether it will, in turn, be related to
maladaptive behaviours;
• To investigate the role of self-efficacy and
its influence on grit as a construct, and
whether self-efficacy has an impact on grit
in producing adaptive or maladaptive
outcomes.

6. Hypotheses
1. Grit will be highly correlated with
conscientiousness, and also positively correlated
with compulsivity.
2. Grit will be correlated with time spent on
unsolvable anagrams.
3. Self-efficacy will mediate the relationship
between passion for word problems and grit.
4. Self-efficacy will moderate the relationship
between grit and time spent on unsolvable
anagrams.

7. Methods
Participants completed a 20-minute anagram task consisting of solvable and unsolvable anagrams.
We measured:
• Task persistence (Time spent persisting
on unsolvable anagrams)
• Grit
• Self-efficacy
• Compulsivity
• Conscientiousness
• Passion for word problems

8. Methods
Measure of compulsivity
• Compulsivity subscale of the Derailers questionnaire.
(Guenole, 2015)
• Measure of a non-clinical maladaptive personality traits
based on the DSM-5 trait framework. (Skodol, Clark, et al., 2011)
• Focuses on extreme, maladaptive variants of normal personality.
• Why? Standard measures of the Big Five do not adequately capture maladaptive
levels of conscientiousness; most items describe adaptive behaviours.
(Haigler & Widiger, 2001; Saulsman & Page, 2004)
• We needed a measure that tapped into the extreme ends of the continuum of
personality, beyond the normal range.

9. Results
1. Grit correlated with
conscientiousness (r=.77) and
compulsivity (r=.33).
2. No significant relationship found
between task persistence and grit.
But task persistence was found to
be negatively associated with self-
efficacy (r=-.20) and passion for
word problems (r=-20).

10. 3. Self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship between passion and grit.
4. Self-efficacy was not found to moderate the relationship between grit and task persistence.
Results
Self-efficacy
Passion for word problems Grit
.49 (.04)*** 2.73 (.63)***
.168*

11. There may be something there,
but it is early days (hence the presentation!)
• Conceptually the idea of Grit makes sense.
• But it appears that there is at least the potential for grit to be maladaptive, especially given the
absence of environment cues and feedback.
• Is there a missing piece to what makes people build and maintain passion over the long-term?
• Limitations:
• We are using cross sectional data, which is no place for mediation.
• The measure of self-efficacy needs to be more of a scale and the match between the scale and
the criterion could be stronger.
• The independence of conscientiousness and maladaptive compulsivity is questionable.

12. The Key Question
• Is grit essential?
• Usher et al., 2019 - An examination of competing mediation
models revealed that self-efficacy partially or fully mediated
the relationship between grit and school outcomes.
• Conversely, little evidence supported grit as a mediator of
self-efficacy’s relationship to outcomes.
• In essence, grit and self-efficacy are related but grit adds little
to our ability to model or explain results when more
fundamental constructs are applied.
• The bar to add something unique to the selection or development
equation is high. Everyone wants to have the new best thing as
that is where the money and fame is.
• The question is: beyond the constructs that we already know to be
predictive, is there any incremental gain or are we simply
repackaging existing concepts in new clothes?
• We leave you with a question: What would Einstein do?

13. References
• Alaoui, L., & Fons-Rosen, C. (2016). Know when to fold'em: The grit factor. Department of
Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
• Alhadabi, A., & Karpinski, A. C. (2020). Grit, self-efficacy, achievement orientation goals, and
academic performance in University students. International Journal of Adolescence and
Youth, 25(1), 519-535.
• Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: a meta-analytic synthesis
of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 113(3), 492-511.
• Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and
passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101.
• Dugan, R., Hochstein, B., Rouziou, M., & Britton, B. (2019). Gritting their teeth to close the sale:
the positive effect of salesperson grit on job satisfaction and performance. Journal of Personal
Selling & Sales Management, 39(1), 81-101.
• Eskreis-Winkler, L., Shulman, E. P., Beal, S. A., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). The grit effect:
Predicting retention in the military, the workplace, school and marriage. Frontiers in
Psychology, 5, 36.
• Guenole, N. (2015). The hierarchical structure of work-related maladaptive personality
traits. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 31(2), 83-90.

14. References
• Haigler, E. D., & Widiger, T. A. (2001). Experimental manipulation of NEO-PI-R items. Journal
of Personality Assessment, 77(2), 339-358.
• Lucas, G. M., Gratch, J., Cheng, L., & Marsella, S. (2015). When the going gets tough: Grit predicts
costly perseverance. Journal of Research in Personality, 59, 15-22.
• Multon, K. D., Brown, S. D., & Lent, R. W. (1991). Relation of self-efficacy beliefs to academic
outcomes: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 38(1), 30.
• Saulsman, L. M., & Page, A. C. (2004). The five-factor model and personality disorder
empirical literature: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 23(8), 1055-1085.
• Schmidt, F. T., Nagy, G., Fleckenstein, J., Möller, J., & Retelsdorf, J. (2018). Same same, but different?
Relations between facets of conscientiousness and grit. European Journal of Personality, 32(6), 705-
720.
• Skodol, A. E., Bender, D. S., Morey, L. C., Clark, L. A., Oldham, J. M., Alarcon, R. D., ... & Siever, L. J.
(2011). Personality disorder types proposed for DSM-5. Journal of Personality Disorders, 25(2), 136-
169.
• Usher, E. L., Li, C. R., Butz, A. R., & Rojas, J. P. (2019). Perseverant grit and self-efficacy: Are both
essential for children’s academic success?. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(5), 877.