The Structure of Hardiness, its Measurement Invariance across Gender and Relationships with Personality Traits and Mental Health Outcomes

A great number of research suggests that hardiness acts as a protective factor in stressful situations, especially in work context. In the present research the factor structure of Dispositional Resilience Scale (DRS; Bartone, Ursano, Wright, & Ingraham, 1989), and its factorial invariance across gender was examined. Furthermore, the relationships of hardiness to five-factor personality traits and several mental health outcomes (positive affect, negative affect and physical symptoms) were also explored. Research was carried out on the sample of 597 employees from different companies. Five hypotheses about the structure of this scale were tested by using confirmatory factor analysis. The results mostly supported one-factor structure of abridged version of DRS (12 items), from which three negatively oriented items originally aimed at measuring challenge were excluded. Regarding measurement invariance across gender, the results of multi-group confirmatory factor analysis show that factor loadings are invariant across the samples of men and women, but error variances of items were not equivalent across samples. Furthermore, the results show that hardiness scales are in low to moderate correlations with five-factor personality traits, suggesting that they could not be subsumed under the five-factor personality traits. Hierarchical regression analyses show the incremental effect of abridged hardiness scale over five-factor personality traits in predicting mental health measures. Predictive strength of hardiness was the highest for positive affect, and considerably lower for negative affect and subjective physical symptoms.