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Introduction
Achieving career success generally requires months or years of effort. Although entrepreneurial activities are regarded as the key to economic development (Hyder and Lussier, 2016; Efobi and Orkoh, 2018), researchers advocates that 70 per cent or more of entrepreneurs quit (Hyder and Lussier, 2016) and that the path to success is long and remote, with immense amounts of stress and a high degree of personal sacrifice (Alexander-Passe, 2017). A lot of researches have examined the determinants of who is working towards the achievement of their long-term goals and who surrenders and gives up. The extant literature underscores the importance of many non-cognitive factors in predicting different positive outcomes. One such underexplored factor that has been connected to positive outcomes, goal striving and attainment is people’s disposition to display passion, and perseverance for the accomplishment of long-term goals (Bonfiglio, 2017). Duckworth et al. (2007) tag this characteristic as “grit,” which is defined as “the perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (p. 1087). There are two aspects that distinguish the construct of grit: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests (Duckworth et al., 2007). In the context of this paper, the latter refers to the extent to which a person can withstand adversity and challenges while maintaining effort and courage to achieve their long-term desires. The former, on the other hand, refers to the degree to which people continuously focus on achieving their long-term ambitions. It is surprising, in spite of the importance of these facets to entrepreneurs, few studies related them with the entrepreneurial outcome and precisely career success (Mooradian et al., 2016; Mueller et al., 2017). Given the explicit distinction in these two facets, it is presently indistinct whether these facets of grit predict essential entrepreneurial outcomes and whether they play the same roles in predicting these outcomes.
Besides, there is an ongoing debate as to whether grit is a first-order or higher order construct consisting of two lower orders. For instance, Duckworth et al. (2007, p. 1091) argued that “neither factor was consistently more predictive of outcomes than the other, and in most cases, the two together were more predictive than either alone.” But recently, studies (Mooradian et al., 2016; Van Doren et al., 2019) argued that consistency...