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While the personality traits competitiveness, hypercompetitiveness, and Machiavellianism all appear conceptually linked by a common focus on the desire to win, the relationships among these three personality characteristics have not been systematically investigated. Past research revealed positive relationships between competitiveness (the desire to win in interpersonal situations) and hypercompetitiveness (a neurotic need to win at all costs), and between hypercompetitiveness and Machiavellianism (a cynical worldview, pragmatic ethics, and the use of duplicitous tactics). However, the relationship between competitiveness and Machiavellianism has remained unexplored. Online survey data from 105 respondents indicated that Machiavellianism was positively related to hypercompetitiveness but not related to competitiveness. These findings support the conceptual distinction between competitiveness and hypercompetitiveness by demonstrating the different relationships these constructs have with Machiavellianism.
Pursuing success is an important social activity linked to both adaptive and maladaptive personality traits. While competitiveness, hypercompetitiveness, and Machiavellianism all represent widely-used personality characteristics associated with the desire to win, the pattern of relationships among these three personality traits has not been systematically investigated. Part of this neglect may stem from conceptual and empirical links between competitiveness and hypercompetitiveness which raise questions about the usefulness of distinctions in the construct and operational definitions of these traits. Fletcher and Nusbaum (2008), while acknowledging that competitiveness and hypercompetitiveness are assessed using different measures, argue that they represent aspects of the same construct and can be combined into a composite variable termed "trait competitiveness." Echoing the call for parsimony, Newby and Klein (2014) propose merging current scales into a unified measure of trait competitiveness with psychometrically derived dimensions. Although merging specific traits into more global composite variables may have some utility in exploring broad personality factors, this approach potentially blurs important theoretical and empirical differences when examining personality characteristics at a more detailed level of analysis. Conversely, creating new dimensions or subscales of competitiveness adds to the proliferation of measures assessing the construct and generates potentially redundant lines of research. To clarify some of the conceptual confusion surrounding competitiveness, hypercompetitiveness, and Machiavellianism, this study investigated the relationships among these three personality traits.
Research on competitiveness, as an individual difference variable, can be traced back more than 100 years to the work of Triplett (1897) on competitive instincts in sports. However, current personality research generally...