Examining the unique and combined effects of grit, trait self-control, and conscientiousness in predicting motivation for academic goals: A commonality analysis

Abstract

The purpose of the present research was to examine the predicative ability of both the unique and combined components of grit, trait self-control, and conscientiousness in the context of academic goal pursuit. Participants (n1=163, n2=551) were asked to complete assessments of each self-regulatory trait. They also identified three goals that they planned to pursue over the next year and rated their motivation for pursuing them, of which we retained only academic goals. Together, grit, trait self-control, and conscientiousness explained 9.9% of the variance in academic goal motivation across both samples. Using commonality analysis, we found that the overlapping components of grit, trait self-control, and conscientiousness accounted for 49.6% of the explained variance (4.9% of the total variance), with the individual components each accounting for less than 20% (2% of the total variance). Implications and suggestions for subsequent research on self-regulatory traits are discussed.

The Determinants of Successful Goal Pursuit

“…Consistent with a plethora of recent research on goal pursuit (e.g., Holding et al, 2017;Milyavskaya et al, 2015;Werner et al, 2016;Werner et al, 2018), the present findings indicate that only 20% of the variance in goal progress was at the between-person (i.e., trait) level, of which the final model was able explain approximately 51%. Even though we appear to be doing a pretty good job at explaining individual differences in goal progress, we are really only accounting for 9% of the variance in total goal progress (across both the between and within-person levels), which is especially problematic considering how many constructs were assessed.…”

“…An example of the jangle fallacy within the goal pursuit literature that has received a lot of attention in recent years is the distinction between trait self-control, conscientiousness, and grit. While research consistently finds that grit, trait self-control, and conscientiousness all correlate at around .70 or higher (Credé et al, 2017;Duckworth et al, 2007;Saunders et al, 2017;Werner et al, 2018), a more recent study using commonality analysis found that it was indeed the shared component of trait self-control, grit, and conscientiousness that was most relevant for goal pursuit (Werner et al, 2018; see also Credé et al, 2017;Vazsonyi et al, 2019).…”

“…However, while grit has been proposed as a higher order personality trait that is unique (see Duckworth & Gross, 2014), a recent large scale meta-analysis finds only weak evidence in support of this proposition (Credé, Tynan, & Harms, 2017). There is also an abundance of research finding that grit highly correlates with other self-regulatory traits, particularly trait selfcontrol and conscientiousness (Credé et al, 2017;Duckworth et al, 2007;Saunders, Milyavskaya, Etz, Randles, & Inzlicht, 2017;Werner, Milyavskaya, Klimo, & Levine, 2018), further indicating that there is a high degree of conceptual overlap, or perhaps the designated measure or the designs that were utilized do not really do a good job representing the construct (e.g., the whole notion of grit being unique is predicated on the pursuit of goals over multiple years, however most research is, at best, a year-long).…”

“…However, at the within-person level, the analysis focuses on the intrapersonal variability comparing how much progress a person makes on their goals compared to their other goals (i.e., because goals are nested within each person, we can compare progress among Goal X, Goal Y, and Goal Z for Person A). While the majority of past research on goal pursuit has focused on the between-person level, recent research indicates that 80-95% of the variance in goal progress is at the within-person level (Holding et al, 2017;Milyavskaya et al, 2015;Werner et al, 2016;Werner et al, 2018). Taking this statistic into consideration, it seems to be the case that researchers have been focusing on the wrong level of analysis, and if we want to truly understand the goal pursuit process, more works needs to be done at the within-person level.…”

“…More optimistically, this also means that there is a whole wealth of information that has yet to be explored, and so if we want to truly understand goal attainment, more work needs to be done at the within-person level Werner et al, 2018). While past research has in some cases assessed multiple goals from each person (a method that is necessary since within-person analyses focus entirely on making comparisons between goals), a lot of crucial information gets lost by aggregating across all of the goals (e.g., Emmons & King, 1988;Little, 1983;Sheldon & Elliot, 1999).…”