Grit at work
Southwick, D. A., Tsay, C.-J., & Duckworth, A. L. (2020). 'Grit at work.' Research in Organizational Behavior, 39, article 100126. doi:10.1016/j.riob.2020.100126. The fullest published answer to the meta-analytic critique, which answers by conceding the frame and narrowing the claim. The sentence the article quotes, verbatim: 'We conceive grit as a facet of conscientiousness, which in the context of the Big Five taxonomy of personality is defined broadly as a spectrum of constructs that describe individual differences in the propensity to be self-controlled, responsible to others, hardworking, orderly, and rule abiding.' What they retain: 'our view is that only grit (a) specifies the compound of both passion and perseverance, (b) sustained over an extended time frame of months and years, and (c) is conceptualized as a dispositional (albeit malleable) trait', and that grit 'has demonstrated incremental predictive validity for objective measures of achievement'. A second concession, to her credit: streamlining the scale and omitting two items that noted a multi-year time frame 'may have been unwise', and the subscales are more distinct in the original twelve-item scale than in the eight-item version.
Southwick, D. A., Tsay, C.-J., & Duckworth, A. L. (2020). 'Grit at work.' Research in Organizational Behavior, 39, article 100126. doi:10.1016/j.riob.2020.100126. The fullest published answer to the meta-analytic critique, which answers by conceding the frame and narrowing the claim. The sentence the article quotes, verbatim: 'We conceive grit as a facet of conscientiousness, which in the context of the Big Five taxonomy of personality is defined broadly as a spectrum of constructs that describe individual differences in the propensity to be self-controlled, responsible to others, hardworking, orderly, and rule abiding.' What they retain: 'our view is that only grit (a) specifies the compound of both passion and perseverance, (b) sustained over an extended time frame of months and years, and (c) is conceptualized as a dispositional (albeit malleable) trait', and that grit 'has demonstrated incremental predictive validity for objective measures of achievement'. A second concession, to her credit: streamlining the scale and omitting two items that noted a multi-year time frame 'may have been unwise', and the subscales are more distinct in the original twelve-item scale than in the eight-item version.
Written from the full text read at source, 2026-10-20.
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Southwick, D. A., Tsay, C.-J., & Duckworth, A. L. (2020). 'Grit at work.' Research in Organizational Behavior, 39, article 100126.