Grit at Work: Angela Duckworth's Passion and Perseverance

By Kevin Kim · Updated Oct 12, 2026

Grit is the tendency to keep working toward long-term goals with both passion and perseverance, even when progress is slow. Psychologist Angela Duckworth and colleagues defined it in 2007 and built a self-report scale to measure it. At work, grit is about sticking with a few goals for years, not just bouncing back from a bad week.

Key Facts

• Duckworth and colleagues defined grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals in a 2007 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• In that paper, grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, across samples that included West Point cadets (N=1,218 and N=1,308) and National Spelling Bee competitors (N=175).
• The short version of the scale, the Grit-S, has 4 fewer items than the original Grit Scale and keeps the same two-factor structure.
• A 2017 meta-analysis of 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals found grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and very strongly correlated with conscientiousness (Credé, Tynan and Harms).
• In a study that included workplace sales, grittier sales employees were more likely to keep their jobs, even after accounting for factors like job tenure and Big Five traits.

What Grit Means, and What It Doesn't

Duckworth's definition has two parts, and both matter. Perseverance is the willingness to keep putting in effort when things get hard or boring. Passion, in her usage, isn't intensity or excitement. It's consistency of interest: caring about the same top-level goal for a long time instead of dropping it for something new every few months.

That second part is what makes grit different from plain hard work. Someone who sprints on a new initiative every quarter is working hard, but they aren't showing grit in this sense. Someone who spends six years getting really good at enterprise renewals, through slow quarters and a few lost accounts, is.

The original paper's own framing is useful. Its authors argued that achieving difficult goals takes not only talent but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time. Grit is a claim about the second half of that sentence.

Grit isn't:

• A synonym for suffering through anything. Quitting a goal that no longer makes sense isn't a grit failure. The construct is about long-term goals you've chosen, not about staying stuck.
• A replacement for ability. In the 2007 paper, grit did not relate positively to IQ. It's a separate dimension from talent, not a stand-in for it.
• A fixed label. It's measured as a trait, but the practical question for a manager is which conditions help people stay with hard goals.

How Grit Is Measured: The Grit Scale and Grit-S

The Grit Scale is a self-report questionnaire. People rate how much statements about persistence and consistency of interests sound like them. It has two parts, matching the definition: perseverance of effort and consistency of interest.

In 2009 Duckworth and Quinn published the Short Grit Scale. The Grit-S retains the 2-factor structure of the original scale with 4 fewer items, so it has 8, and the authors reported good internal consistency and test-retest stability. They also developed an informant-report version, where someone else rates you. Among adults, the Grit-S was associated with educational attainment and fewer career changes. Among West Point cadets it predicted retention, and among spelling bee finalists it predicted how far they got, a link mediated by lifetime spelling practice.

That last detail is worth noticing. The gritty spellers didn't succeed through some mysterious trait. They did more deliberate practice. For a manager, that's the actionable bit: grit shows up as behavior over time.

One caution on measurement. Because it's self-report, the score reflects how people see themselves, and people can answer differently when the stakes are high. Duckworth herself has been direct about this in a related context. In a paper on measuring personal qualities such as grit for school purposes, she and David Yeager wrote that no available measure is suitable for between-school accountability judgments. That was about schools, but the same logic is a good reason not to use a self-report grit score as a gate for hiring or pay.

The Evidence: Original Studies

The 2007 paper tested grit across several very different groups. It reported that grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes across these samples:

The authors also reported that grit showed incremental predictive validity over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness. Four percent of variance isn't huge, and Duckworth's team didn't claim it was. It means grit is one predictor among several, and a modest one.

A later paper by Eskreis-Winkler and colleagues tested retention in four settings: the military, workplace sales, high school and marriage. They found that grittier soldiers were more likely to complete an Army Special Operations Forces selection course, and that grittier sales employees were more likely to keep their jobs. Note the outcome: staying, not necessarily excelling. Retention is a real business concern, though, especially in roles with high early turnover.

The Critiques, Honestly

Grit got famous quickly, and the pushback was fair. The most cited critique is the 2017 meta-analysis by Credé, Tynan and Harms. Using 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples, they reported four findings that matter for anyone using grit at work:

1. The two-part structure isn't confirmed. The idea that grit is one higher-order trait made of perseverance and consistency of interest wasn't supported.
2. The prediction is modest. Grit was only moderately correlated with performance and retention.
3. It overlaps heavily with conscientiousness. The correlation was very strong, which raises the question of whether grit is a new trait at all.
4. Perseverance does most of the work. The perseverance of effort facet had stronger criterion validities than consistency of interest, and it explained variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness.

Their conclusion was blunt: interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, and the primary utility of grit may lie in the perseverance facet.

So where does that leave a manager? Roughly here. The behavior grit describes, sticking with long-term goals, clearly matters. Conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits, has a long research record on job performance, including the Barrick and Mount meta-analysis that found it the one Big Five trait consistently related to performance across occupations. Whether grit adds a lot beyond that is disputed. The sensible response isn't to dismiss grit or worship it. It's to treat it as a useful name for long-haul effort, and to focus on the conditions that make long-haul effort possible.

Grit vs Resilience, Growth Mindset, Self-Discipline and Conscientiousness

These ideas overlap in everyday conversation, and mixing them up leads to muddled coaching. Here's how to tell them apart.

A quick example of the resilience difference. Two account executives lose the same big deal. The resilient one is back on the phone by Monday. The gritty one is also back by Monday, but what sets them apart is that they've been pursuing the same goal, say becoming the go-to expert in mid-market healthcare, for five years and will for five more. Resilience got them through the week. Grit is why the goal is still the goal.

How to Build Grit on a Team: Step by Step

Since the research suggests weak effects from "grit training" on its own, the realistic job for a manager is to create conditions where long-term effort makes sense and gets noticed.

1. Start with a goal worth staying with. Persistence needs a destination. Help each person name one multi-year goal tied to their craft, not just this quarter's number. Our guide to goal setting covers how to word it.
2. Cut goal-hopping. Count how many priorities a person is carrying. If the top-level direction changes every month, no one can show consistency of interest. Protect a few priorities from reshuffling.
3. Break the long goal into stages with visible progress. Slow progress is when people quit. Mark milestones so a six-month stretch doesn't feel like nothing happened.
4. Make practice deliberate. Recall the spelling bee finding: the link between grit and results ran through practice. Pick one skill per person and schedule regular, focused work on it, with feedback.
5. Reward the long haul, not just peaks. If only the loudest quarter gets recognized, steady builders learn that steadiness doesn't count.
6. Normalize the dip. Tell people in advance that the middle of a hard goal feels flat. Share examples from your own career.
7. Support the underlying drive. Persistence tied to real interest lasts longer than persistence on willpower. See self-motivation for how to help people find what pulls them forward.
8. Review for stuck versus committed. Every few months, ask: is this person still pursuing a goal that matters, or just refusing to stop? Letting go of a dead end is a healthy decision, not a failure of grit.

Ready-to-Copy Template: Long-Haul Goal Plan

Copy this table and fill in one per person. Review it quarterly in a one-on-one.

The "most likely point where I'll want to quit" row does the heavy lifting. People rarely plan for the flat stretch, and naming it early makes it less of a surprise.

Examples by Business Function

These are illustrations of how a team could apply the idea, not claims about what the research found in each function.

For related ideas, see results orientation and work ethic.

Do's and Don'ts

Common Mistakes

Calling overwork grit. Working 70-hour weeks isn't what the research measured. The scale is about perseverance and consistency of interest over time. Burning out in six months is the opposite of the long haul.

Blaming individuals for system problems. If a team keeps missing a goal because the goal changed three times, telling people to be grittier is unfair. Fix the conditions first.

Ignoring the conscientiousness overlap. Because grit correlates very strongly with conscientiousness, a high score may tell you less than the label suggests. Don't treat it as a new, separate talent you can read from a questionnaire.

Using the score for high-stakes decisions. Self-report measures are easy to game and, as Duckworth and Yeager noted about schools, not suitable for accountability judgments. Use it for conversation.

Confusing stubbornness with commitment. Staying with a goal after the evidence says it won't work isn't grit in any useful sense. Build in review points.