Researchers studied more than 2,200 working adults and found that people who persisted through setbacks earned more and were more satisfied with their careers — associations that remained even after accounting for intelligence and conscientiousness.

Persistence occupies a flattering place in the stories we tell about work. Ability may open a door, but the person who keeps going after a rejection, a failed project or a slow year is supposed to travel further.

A 2019 study offers qualified support for that idea. In a representative sample of 2,246 employed adults in Germany, people who scored higher on a short measure of grit reported higher monthly income and greater job satisfaction. Those associations remained after the researchers accounted for cognitive ability, education, demographic factors and the overlap between grit and conscientiousness.

This is one study, not settled consensus. It was correlational and largely cross-sectional, and it measured satisfaction with a current job rather than satisfaction with an entire career. That distinction is easy to lose in a headline.

What the researchers actually measured

The paper, published in PLOS ONE, was led by Clemens M. Lechner of GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, with Daniel Danner and Beatrice Rammstedt. It used the German PIAAC Longitudinal Study, a follow-up to the OECD’s survey of adult skills.

The employed subsample comprised adults working at least 20 hours a week. Their cognitive ability had been assessed in 2012 through extensive tests of literacy, numeracy and problem solving. In 2014 they answered questions about personality, employment and attitudes towards work. Statistical weights were used to make the sample representative of German workers on characteristics including age, gender, education, region and municipality size.

Grit was measured with five self-report statements. Four concerned perseverance and one concerned consistency of interest. They included “I am a hard worker”, “I am diligent”, “I finish whatever I begin”, “I can cope with setbacks” and a reverse-scored item about difficulty maintaining focus on projects lasting more than a few months.

This was a scale score, not direct observation of someone persisting through an actual setback.

The income and satisfaction effects were modest

When grit was treated as a general factor, a person scoring one standard deviation above the mean was expected to report 8.3 per cent higher monthly income. At the sample’s median gross income of €2,500, that was about €208 a month. The same difference in grit corresponded to 0.38 points more job satisfaction on an 11-point scale, an effect of 0.19 standard deviations.

The researchers then applied a stricter model. They treated grit as a facet of conscientiousness and asked whether the part left over still related to the outcomes. On that analysis, one standard deviation in the residual grit facet corresponded to roughly 10 per cent higher monthly income, or €249 at the median, and 0.34 points more job satisfaction.

These were statistically detectable associations, but small ones. Cognitive ability was the stronger predictor of income and occupational prestige. Grit did not replace intelligence, education, occupation, experience, bargaining power or the structure of the labour market.

Grit overlaps heavily with conscientiousness

Grit is a comparatively new label for qualities psychologists have studied for much longer: industriousness, self-discipline, persistence and conscientiousness. The distinction matters because a new name can make an existing trait sound like a separate psychological discovery.

In this study, grit and conscientiousness correlated at 0.78 when both were modelled as ordinary factors. Once their shared variance was removed, the remaining grit factor was defined most strongly by being diligent and being able to cope with setbacks.

The authors were direct about this. They agreed with critics that grit is hardly different from established conscientiousness facets, particularly industriousness and productiveness. Their argument was narrower: even as a facet, the persistence component may add a little information about career outcomes.

A 2017 meta-analysis led by Marcus Credé arrived at a similarly cautious picture. Across 584 effects from 88 independent samples involving 66,807 people, grit was strongly related to conscientiousness and only moderately related to performance and retention. Perseverance of effort performed better than consistency of interests.

The study cannot establish cause

Higher grit and better career outcomes appeared together in this dataset. The design cannot show which produced which, or whether another feature of a person’s job or background helped produce both.

The cognitive tests came from 2012, but grit, income and job satisfaction were measured in the 2014 wave. The central career associations were therefore cross-sectional. A person may infer that they are persistent because their job is going well. A stable, well-paid role may make it easier to keep pursuing long projects. The direction could run both ways.

The measures also relied on self-report. Monthly income is more concrete than a personality judgement, but respondents still supplied it. Job satisfaction was a single question. Both the grit scale and the three-item conscientiousness scale had fairly low reliability, a limitation the authors addressed with latent-variable models but could not make disappear.

Another representative-sample study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, offered a stronger challenge. Chen Zisman and Yoav Ganzach reported that intelligence contributed much more than grit to educational and job-market success in their American sample, while conscientiousness also contributed more than grit. Different samples and modelling decisions can change the ranking.

More effort did not translate neatly into more success

The German study also examined career engagement: overtime, professional-development courses and attitudes towards lifelong learning. Before grit was separated from conscientiousness, grittier workers reported more of all three. After the shared personality variance was removed, the residual grit facet was strongly associated with overtime but not course participation or learning orientation.

A one-standard-deviation increase in that residual grit facet was associated with 21 per cent more overtime. The authors noticed the imbalance: extra time invested by grittier workers did not translate proportionally into income or occupational prestige. Persistence may be useful, but workplaces decide how effort is recognised and rewarded.

I have written before about how successful routines can reduce the need for willpower. The grit finding sits beside that work rather than replacing it. A personality tendency may matter, while schedules, managers, autonomy and job design determine how often someone must spend effort simply overcoming friction.

Persistence is not a complete theory of careers

The popular version of grit can turn career success into a morality tale. People who advance kept going; people who did not must have stopped too soon. This paper does not support that conclusion.

The sample represents one national labour market at one point in time. The models cannot absorb every difference in discrimination, family responsibilities, health, wealth, access to training, management quality or plain luck. Nor can they tell us whether persisting with a poor goal is wiser than changing direction.

The defensible result is modest. Self-reported effortful persistence contained some information about income and job satisfaction beyond intelligence and broad conscientiousness. It did not dominate those predictors, and the study did not show that teaching people to persist would raise their pay.

Persistence appears to matter. The conditions deciding whether it pays off matter as well.