Year: 2018
Type: review
Study designs: Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis
Abstract: The current paper makes five contributions to our understanding of competitive personality. First, I define competitive personality as a trait. Second, I review the historical origins of the trait, as it emerged in four adjacent subfields within psychology (i.e., health psychology, psychology of gender, cross-cultural psychology, and psychoanalysis). Third, I compile the most-used measures of competitive personality (most of which have not been labeled “competitive personality”), and empirically evaluate the convergent validity amongst these measures using confirmatory factor analysis. This effort also entails the development of the Competitive Personality Scale, a brief scale that reflects the essential content of the trait. Fourth, I establish the nomological validity of competitive personality vis-à-vis other personality traits, job attitudes, work behaviors, and demographics. Fifth, after demonstrating the variety of psychological literatures that have surreptitiously focused on competitive personality, I use meta-analytic methods to summarize evidence across these literatures on the relationships between competitive personality and other related constructs. Results support the contention that competitive personality is an important facet of human individual differences, that it has been studied under many different labels, and that it predicts critical outcomes in work organizations.
Author: Kathleen A. Yearick
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2894499065