How Competitive Are You?
There are two kinds, and only one of them costs you
Competitiveness gets argued about as though it were a single thing you either have too much of or not enough. The research splits it in two, and the split is the useful part. One kind is about the result - winning, ranking, being ahead - and it is the one linked to worse wellbeing, more mistrust and thinner relationships. The other is about the process: competition as the thing that makes you work harder and get better, with the outcome secondary. They look identical from the outside and they behave nothing alike.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you usually are, across work, sport, games and everything else. Being high on one kind and low on the other is the most informative result here.
What it measures
The two competitive attitudes the research separates, plus a third thing that is not the opposite of either: staying out of competition altogether. Low competitiveness and avoidance of competition are different, and telling them apart matters, because one is contentment and the other is a cost.
Based on: Hypercompetitive and personal development competitive attitudes (Ryckman et al., 1990, 1996)
Possible results
Winning
Competition as a verdict on you.
Getting better
Competition as the thing that raises your game.
Staying out
Keeping away from anything that could be measured.
Common questions
Is being competitive a bad thing?
The question cannot be answered until you say which kind, and that is the point of splitting it. The result-focused version is the one associated with mistrust, defensiveness and lower wellbeing. The process-focused version travels with effort, improvement and, in at least one line of studies, more forgiveness. Same energy, different target - which is why the useful goal is rarely to be less competitive and usually to move the drive from the first bar to the second.
How do I stop taking losing so hard?
Not by caring less, which does not work and would cost you the part that is useful. What changes is what the result is being asked to prove. If a loss is information about a performance, it is survivable and even interesting. If it is information about your worth, no amount of preparation will make it safe, because the thing at stake was never the game. A specific test: after losing, notice whether your first thought is about what happened or about what it says about you.
What if I scored low on both of the first two?
Then look at the third bar, because it changes the reading entirely. Low on both with low avoidance is simply someone who is not motivated by comparison, which is common and costs nothing. Low on both with high avoidance is a different picture: the drive may be there and be getting spent on staying out of range. The first is a preference. The second is worth a second look.
Sources
- Ryckman, R. M., Hammer, M., Kaczor, L. M., & Gold, J. A. (1990). Construction of a Hypercompetitive Attitude Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment.
- Ryckman, R. M., Hammer, M., Kaczor, L. M., & Gold, J. A. (1996). Construction of a personal development competitive attitude scale. Journal of Personality Assessment.
An honest note The first two bars follow two real scales built by the same group, and the distinction between them is the best-supported thing on this page: one orientation is aimed at the result and the other at the process, and they relate to wellbeing in opposite directions. The third bar is the weakest of the three. Avoidance of competition has been described in the same line of work, but it is measured far less consistently than the other two, so treat it as a description rather than a score. Two further limits worth stating. All of this is self-report about attitudes, and competitive attitudes are among the things people are least inclined to report honestly about themselves. And the evidence linking the winning-focused kind to poorer wellbeing is correlational - the two go together reliably, but nothing here establishes which one arrived first.
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