Why people compete matters for careers, well-being and gender differences

Three reasons to compete

Traditional measures of competitiveness were most closely related to enjoying competition and wanting to win. A survey measure also captured some general willingness to seek challenges, although that overlap was much smaller after accounting for standard personality traits.

Both people who enjoy competing and people motivated by winning had better professional outcomes than other participants. Beyond that similarity, the groups differed. Those who enjoyed competition tended to report greater happiness and mental stability, as well as more extroversion and willingness to take risks. Those driven by winning tended to report lower happiness, greater neuroticism, more disagreeableness, more manipulative tendencies and greater willingness to respond negatively to others.

Enjoyment of competition and desire to win were associated with labor-market outcomes and personal well-being even after accounting for general challenge seeking. Enjoyment of competition also differed more between women and men and had more explanatory power for gender differences in labor-market outcomes than desire to win or general challenge seeking. The researchers found that willingness to compete and general willingness to seek challenges were related but distinct.

Why the motives matter

A single question about whether someone is competitive can combine different motivations that have contrasting links to well-being and personality. Separating enjoyment of competition from the desire to win may therefore give a clearer picture of how competitiveness relates to careers and gender differences in labor-market outcomes.

The findings also suggest that competing with others is not simply another form of seeking difficult tasks. Detailed measures can reveal differences that a broad competition measure may miss, although the three competitiveness dimensions still overlap substantially.

Evidence and caveats

The study used a detailed questionnaire administered in July 2021 to participants in the Dutch LISS online panel, linked with panel measures of work, education, personality, cognitive skills and other preferences. It also compared the new measures with an incentivized competition task and a single survey question about competitiveness.

The results are primarily associations from survey and linked panel data, so they do not by themselves show that a particular competitive motive causes career success or changes well-being. The three motives were strongly correlated with one another and with the general competition measure. The researchers also created the two questions used to measure general challenge seeking because they could not find a validated scale for it. The excerpts do not report the study's sample size.