Personality, Grit and Sporting Achievement

The role of personality traits in sporting achievement has generated interests among sport researchers and practitioners, however, studies on the relationship between sporting achievement and personality traits have yielded no clear evidence of a cause effect relationship. Instead, psychological skills and attitudes have shown evidence of influence over sporting achievement. This study explored the possibility that grit, which is a behavioural element, would be more related to sporting achievement than personality traits. In total, 142 sport men & women (Mean age = 24.7 S= 3.5) completed the Grit Scale (Duckworth, Matthews & Kelly 2007) and the BFI-10 (Rammstedt& John, 2007), the level at which participant play in their sports was used as a measure of achievement. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that Grit was a predictor of sporting achievement while personality traits showed no significant differences. The result also indicated that age differences may affect the levels of Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness of the Big Five Personality traits as well as the Ambition sub-scale of the Grit scale.