Mental toughness (MT) has been shown to predict outcomes across a variety of high-stress contexts such as athletics, the military, and the workplace. Despite this, researchers have struggled to reach consensus regarding how best to conceptualize and measure MT. Specifically, MT assessments have focused on measuring general MT rather than domain-specific MT. The current study proposes a measurement model of MT grounded in social-cognitive theory and introduced an assessment of MT within a situational judgment test framework to assess MT in the workplace. Participants completed a battery consisting of the new measure as well as measures intended to establish construct validity. Factor analyses suggested a three-factor solution fit the data best. Furthermore, cross-structure analyses indicated that the new assessment avoided common-method bias in responding, as evident by weak correlations with measures of other constructs. / Master of Science / Mental toughness (MT) has been shown to be a resource that buffers against the negative effects of distress and predicts outcomes across a variety of settings, including the workplace. However, widely used self-report MT questionnaires have numerous issues, such as a lack of context. The current study addressed a number of these issues by creating a measure of MT wherein respondents were given a workplace situation and asked the likelihood that they would respond in a variety of manners, thereby assessing MT as relevant to the workplace context. Three factors of MT were most prominent – task persistence, emotional control, and utilization of feedback. The measure introduced in the current study had small associations with existing self-report measures of MT, personality, and distress, suggesting that the new method of measuring MT avoided some issues inherent to self-report responding. This research laid promising groundwork for the future assessment of MT in the workplace.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/83922 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Flannery, Nicholas M. |
| Contributors | Psychology, Hauenstein, Neil M. A., Foti, Roseanne J., Geller, E. Scott |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ |
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