Understanding grit in an organisational context : the concept of grit and its role as a predictor of work-related stress and employee performance

Abstract

In recent years, non-cognitive personality factors have received increasing attention due to studies that suggested that they could be highly important in employee selection and development processes. Substantial research and practical reasoning suggests that the ability to persevere and be passionate about one’s long-term goals despite challenges and setbacks is considered a key factor of success in today’s society. This thesis focuses on grit, a non-cognitive personality trait grit that has been defined as a combination of perseverance and passion for long term goals. Building on inconclusive preliminary results that indicated that grit might be a crucial factor for employee performance and the experience of work-related stress, this thesis reports on research that aimed to explore the applicability of grit in the workplace. The research used a cross-sectional research design and empirically tested the predictive validity of grit on individual performance and its relationship to PsyCap, resilience and work-related stress in a stratified sample of the UK government’s Companies House Basic Company Data. To provide a holistic insight into the impact of grit on job performance, the three dimensions of task performance, organisational citizenship behaviour and innovative performance were assessed. A survey method was applied to a cross sectional sample of 2089 employees to provide generalisable results across UK workers. The findings of this research suggest that despite issues in its current conceptualisation, grit is a distinctive construct compared to resilience and PsyCap and impacts individual outcomes in the organisational context. Furthermore, findings suggest that grit is a significant predictor of job performance and work-related stress across the research sample. The findings have significant implications for theory by showing that grit is a unique personality characteristic that could enhance current HRM processes to increase employee performance and reduce work-related stress.