What is Achievement Striving?

What does achievement striving mean?

Achievement Striving is how strongly you want to reach big goals and do excellent work in the things you choose. Put another way, it is a restless hunger to do the thing well, then better, then better than that.

The phrase is technical rather than everyday, and the everyday word closest to it is ambition. What it describes is where you set the bar and how much you want to clear it: aiming at something demanding, holding a standard for your own work, having a direction rather than drifting. It is about the target, not the labour.

It is not competitiveness, which is about other people's positions rather than your own standard, and it is not status seeking, since the goal can be private and unimpressive to anyone else. It is also not perfectionism in the anxious sense: a high bar that raises the work is a different thing from a bar that stops it being shown.

Which personality dimension is Achievement Striving part of?

Achievement Striving is a facet of Conscientiousness, the Big Five dimension describing how organised, dependable and self-disciplined a person tends to be. Broad dimensions are hierarchies, and a narrow trait underneath one often describes a behaviour more exactly than the domain score can.

The NEO inventories list achievement striving as one of the six facets of Conscientiousness, covering aspiration level, diligence and a sense of direction (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The BFI-2 covers adjacent ground under productiveness in its three-facet hierarchy (Soto & John, 2017). At the intermediate level, Conscientiousness divides into two aspects, and this facet sits on the industriousness side rather than the orderliness side (DeYoung et al., 2007). HEXACO places a diligence facet under its own Conscientiousness factor (Lee & Ashton, 2004), and free versions of these scales exist in the public-domain IPIP pools (Goldberg et al., 2006; Johnson, 2014).

The named scales behind it are: IPIP NEO-PI-R C4 Achievement Striving facet; JPI-R / PRF Achievement; BFAS Industriousness aspect. They ask how high you aim, whether you hold yourself to a standard, and whether you have a direction you are working toward.

How is Achievement Striving different from Industriousness and Self-Discipline?

These three are the working facets of Conscientiousness. Achievement striving sets the height of the bar. Industriousness is the drive to work hard and get things done, whatever the bar happens to be. Self-Discipline is what carries a particular task through boredom and distraction to the end.

A runner who enters a marathon rather than a five kilometre race is showing achievement striving. One who trains five mornings a week for a year is showing industriousness. One who finishes the last dull ten weeks in the rain is showing self-discipline. Combinations matter more than any single score: high standards without sustained effort produce long lists of abandoned plans.

What does high Achievement Striving look like?

It looks like a person with a direction. The target was chosen rather than inherited, and the standard holds even when nobody would check.

• You set the goal higher than the version that would have been accepted.
• Good enough is a judgement you make, not a line somebody hands you.
• You measure this year against last year rather than against the person next to you.
• You would rather do one demanding thing well than four easy things quickly.

The costs are specific. A standard you hold for yourself can be applied to other people who never agreed to it. Satisfaction can be deferred so reliably that arriving never feels like anything. And a bar set high enough makes starting harder, because the gap between the first draft and the standard is visible from the beginning.

What does low Achievement Striving look like?

Low scores describe someone who is content with a good enough result, and that contentment is worth something real.

• You finish things, because the standard was reachable in the first place.
• You are easy to work with, since your bar is not imposed on anyone else.
• You measure a life by how it is lived rather than by what it ranked.
• You rest without the feeling that you should be somewhere further on.

The costs land where the reward needed an ambitious target. Opportunities that go to whoever asked for them tend to be missed, and work that would have been notable often stops at adequate. Neither end is the good one, and most people sit between them.

What does the research say about achievement striving?

The strong evidence sits at the level of the parent dimension, and it is honest to say so. In the meta-analysis of the Big Five and job performance, Conscientiousness was the only dimension that predicted performance across every occupational group studied (Barrick & Mount, 1991). It predicts academic performance largely independently of measured intelligence, and once earlier school results are controlled it adds as much to the prediction of university performance as intelligence does (Poropat, 2009). A meta-analysis of the behaviours contributing most to mortality found it related to fewer risky habits (Bogg & Roberts, 2004), and across large studies traits predict outcomes such as divorce and occupational attainment about as well as socioeconomic status and cognitive ability (Roberts et al., 2007).

The facet is still worth measuring, because the domain score averages away differences that matter: two people with identical Conscientiousness scores can differ sharply in where they set the bar. Inventories keep a facet level for that reason, and facet scores add predictive power the domain score alone misses (Soto & John, 2017), while the aspect research shows the dimension's halves are separable in the same person (DeYoung et al., 2007).

On change: mean levels of Conscientiousness rise across adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006), and a systematic review found trait measures shifted during interventions, mostly therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). Goals themselves move over a life, which is why a score is a reading at a point in time rather than a fixed setting.

How does Wellington measure Achievement Striving?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot is 60 questions, about 7 minutes, and scores six dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience, Honesty-Humility. The first ten are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown. There is no card. It scores Conscientiousness as a whole, not the facets beneath it.

Achievement Striving is scored from 8 statements rated on a five-point accuracy scale, and it is one of the 90 traits with the membership, which adds the Portrait, 336 questions in 4 chapters. The average is placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced up to the 70th, High above it. Those norms are provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. It is not built for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Every trait has three pages written in advance by the writing and psychology team, one per band, and your answers choose which you read. For Achievement Striving, Quiet is The Contented Path (You measure a life by how it is lived, not ranked), Balanced is The Measured Climber (You aim high where it matters and let the rest be), and High is The Summit Seeker (Good enough has never once been enough for you). The methodology shows a worked example and gives the scoring.

Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional.

Questions people ask

Is achievement striving the same as ambition?

Ambition is the everyday word for most of what the facet covers, so the two are close. The trait term is narrower in one useful way: it is about the standard you hold and the direction you are working in, rather than about wanting status.

Can Achievement Striving change?

Yes, modestly, and the goals themselves change more than the tendency does. Conscientiousness rises on average across adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006), and a systematic review found trait measures shifted during interventions, mostly therapy and counselling trials (Roberts et al., 2017). Wanting to change was followed by measured change over sixteen weeks, and specific if-then plans helped more than general intentions (Hudson & Fraley, 2015).

Is a high score the same as perfectionism?

No. Achievement striving is about where the bar is set and whether you work toward it. Perfectionism in its unhelpful form is about what a missed bar means, and it tends to slow work down rather than raise it. A high standard that gets things finished and a high standard that stops them being shown are different patterns.

What does a low score mean?

That you aim lower and hold looser standards than most of the people who answered the same statements. It describes a tendency, not effort or worth. Low scorers often finish more of what they begin, because the target was reachable, and they tend to be easier to work alongside.