Interpersonal Competitiveness

Abstract

The Interpersonal Competitiveness (IC) scale is an influential psychometric instrument designed to evaluate an individual’s dispositional drive to outperform others, secure victory, and assert superiority in comparative interpersonal scenarios. Originally formulated by psychometrician Charlene A. Griffin-Pierson (1990) as a foundational subscale of the multidimensional Competitiveness Questionnaire (CQ), the 8-item Interpersonal Competitiveness measure was subsequently adapted and validated by Eugene Chan and Barbara Briers (2019) in experimental consumer psychology and behavioral decision-making contexts. The instrument assesses a distinct psychological construct characterized by a zero-sum, other-referenced orientation toward achievement, cleanly demarcated from mastery-oriented or self-referenced strivings (often operationalized as goal competitiveness). Comprising eight self-report items evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 5 (Strongly agree), the instrument demonstrates robust psychometric properties across diverse populations. Confirmatory factor analytic investigations consistently confirm the unidimensionality of the 8-item structure, yielding excellent fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index > .95; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation < .06) and solid internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .76 and .86). Extensive construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity studies substantiate the scale’s capacity to predict real-world behavioral outcomes, such as performance decrements or surges under social comparison, competitive consumer choices, negotiation aggression, and status-seeking consumption. This comprehensive article provides an exhaustive psychometric examination of the Interpersonal Competitiveness scale, detailing its theoretical foundation, structural validity, empirical applications, scoring protocols, and full authentic item inventory.

Keywords

Interpersonal Competitiveness, Competitiveness Questionnaire, social comparison, achievement motivation, ego orientation, psychometrics, trait competitiveness, zero-sum mindset, Chan and Briers, Griffin-Pierson

Authors

The Interpersonal Competitiveness (IC) scale traces its origins to the psychometric work of Charlene A. Griffin-Pierson, who developed the overarching Competitiveness Questionnaire during her tenure at the University of Florida and subsequent academic appointments in educational psychology. Griffin-Pierson (1990) sought to disentangle the conflated dimensions of competitiveness, separating personal mastery from interpersonal triumph.

The 8-item standalone Interpersonal Competitiveness scale gained renewed prominence and contemporary validation through the empirical investigations of Eugene Y. Chan and Barbara Briers:

• Eugene Y. Chan, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Dr. Chan has held academic appointments at institutions including Monash University, the University of Technology Sydney, and Purdue University. His research program centers on social decision-making, moral behaviors, competitive psychology, and the cognitive heuristics governing consumer judgment.
• Barbara Briers, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at institutions including IÉSEG School of Management and formerly Tilburg University. Dr. Briers specializes in consumer well-being, prosocial and competitive consumer behavior, evolutionary psychology, and self-regulation.

In their seminal 2019 investigation published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Chan and Briers isolated Griffin-Pierson’s 8-item Interpersonal Competitiveness subscale to examine how individual differences in interpersonal competitive desire moderate responses to social comparison benchmarks during goal-directed tasks.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Interpersonal Competitiveness (IC) scale is to measure an individual’s chronic psychological motivation to win against others, establish personal dominance, and evaluate self-worth through comparative superiority. While competitiveness is frequently conceptualized as a monolithic trait, psychometric advances have revealed that individuals pursue success through fundamentally disparate motivational vectors. Some individuals strive against objective standards of excellence or personal past performance, whereas others are predominantly motivated by the relative subjugation or outperforming of peers.

The IC scale was explicitly engineered to capture this latter dynamic. In research settings, the instrument fulfills several critical purposes:

• Deconfounding Motivational Orientations: It distinguishes individuals whose achievement strivings are anchored in interpersonal rivalry from those driven by intrinsic competence, task absorption, or self-actualization.
• Investigating Social Comparison Sensitivity: Following the paradigms established by Festinger’s Social Comparison Theory, the scale allows researchers to predict who will perceive upward or downward social comparisons as energizing versus demotivating. Chan and Briers (2019) demonstrated that high-IC individuals respond markedly differently when an opponent or peer nears the completion of a goal compared to low-IC individuals.
• Behavioral Economics and Consumer Psychology: The IC scale is utilized to investigate zero-sum purchasing scenarios, luxury status-signaling, bidding wars in auctions, and hostile or cooperative bargaining tactics in commercial negotiations.
• Organizational and Educational Diagnostics: In workplace and academic settings, the scale provides a quantitative metric to assess organizational climate fit, individual predisposition toward destructive interpersonal sabotage versus healthy competition, and vulnerability to burnout or performance anxiety in ranking-based evaluation systems.

From a theoretical perspective, the rationale behind the scale lies in recognizing that winning in competitive contexts entails unique emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal costs and benefits. Individuals high in interpersonal competitiveness do not merely view games, workplace projects, or academic assessments as opportunities to build competence; they view them as social arenas wherein rank ordering directly informs their self-concept. Measuring this disposition with brevity and psychometric precision enables researchers to control for or directly test the moderating effects of interpersonal rivalry across diverse behavioral domains.

Psychological Construct

The construct of Interpersonal Competitiveness is defined as a stable, dispositional trait reflecting the desire to perform better than others, win in interpersonal contests, and validate one’s competence via social comparison. To comprehend the depth of this construct, it is necessary to contrast it with related but fundamentally divergent psychological dimensions.

Interpersonal vs. Goal Competitiveness

In Griffin-Pierson’s (1990) theoretical formulation, competitiveness bifurcates into two distinct constructs:

1. Goal Competitiveness: The drive to master a challenge, accomplish personal objectives, and achieve high standards of excellence. In goal competitiveness, other people serve as benchmarks or co-actors, but personal success is not contingent on their failure.
2. Interpersonal Competitiveness: A zero-sum motivational framework wherein personal success is explicitly contingent on others performing worse. Success is defined relative to the peer group. As encapsulated by authentic scale items, high-IC individuals endorse sentiments such as “I like to be better than others at things” and “I feel that winning is important in both work and games.”

Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Dimensions

The psychological construct of interpersonal competitiveness spans cognitive appraisals, affective responses, and behavioral strategies:

• Cognitive Appraisals: Individuals characterized by high interpersonal competitiveness frame diverse life domains — ranging from casual recreation to corporate career trajectories — through comparative and hierarchical schemas. They process normative feedback (how one ranks against peers) far more attentively than ipsative feedback (how one improves relative to one’s past). Ambiguous situations are routinely interpreted as contests with winners and losers.
• Affective Experiences: Affective well-being among high-IC individuals is tightly coupled to relative standing. Experiencing superior status evokes high-arousal positive affect (triumph, pride, schadenfreude), whereas falling behind induces acute negative affect, including resentment, envy, status anxiety, and frustration. Conversely, low-IC individuals can derive profound satisfaction from task involvement and skill development regardless of whether a peer achieves a higher score.
• Behavioral Tendencies: High-IC individuals are more prone to engage in tactical maneuvers aimed at maximizing the performance gap between themselves and competitors. Under certain conditions, this manifest as intensified effort, prolonged persistence, and meticulous preparation. However, when cooperative outcomes are required, high interpersonal competitiveness can elicit withholding of information, sabotage, or relational aggression.

Theoretical Framework

The Interpersonal Competitiveness scale is anchored at the intersection of several foundational psychological paradigms, notably Social Comparison Theory, Achievement Goal Theory, and Self-Determination Theory.

Social Comparison Theory

Leon Festinger (1954) posited that human beings possess an innate drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities. In the absence of physical, non-social standards, individuals evaluate their capabilities by comparing themselves with others. Festinger identified a unidirectional upward drive for abilities, indicating that people generally prefer to perform slightly better than their comparison targets. Griffin-Pierson operationalized interpersonal competitiveness as the intensified, chronification of this upward social comparison drive. For individuals elevated on this trait, social comparison is not merely an informational heuristic used to reduce uncertainty; it is an affective imperative used to construct and defend social dominance.

Achievement Goal Theory

Within educational and developmental psychology, researchers such as John Nicholls (1984), Carol Dweck (1986), and Andrew Elliot (1999) conceptualized achievement motivation along two major trajectories: task/mastery orientation and ego/performance orientation. Interpersonal competitiveness represents an operational manifestation of an ego-approach orientation. In this framework, competence is normatively referenced. Success is defined as demonstrating superior normative ability, whereas failure is defined as demonstrating inferior ability. The IC scale items directly reflect an ego-involved mindset where task engagement is secondary to interpersonal supremacy.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT)

Viewed through the lens of Deci and Ryan’s (1985, 2000) Self-Determination Theory, interpersonal competitiveness represents a predominantly extrinsic, introjected, or ego-involved motivational dynamic. While high-IC individuals may display intense energy and behavioral vigor, their perceived locus of causality is externally referenced — reliant upon outperforming others rather than experiencing autonomous, intrinsic enjoyment of the activity. Consequently, when outperforming others becomes impossible (e.g., confronting an unbeatable opponent), high-IC individuals may experience severe motivational collapses, self-handicapping, or disengagement, a phenomenon empirically illuminated by Chan and Briers (2019).

Validity

The Interpersonal Competitiveness scale has undergone rigorous empirical validation across multiple psychometric studies, establishing strong construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Griffin-Pierson (1990) established the foundational construct validity of the Competitiveness Questionnaire across a developmental sample of undergraduate students and adult community members. Exploratory factor analyses consistently revealed a clear bifurcation between the Goal Competitiveness and Interpersonal Competitiveness dimensions, demonstrating that the two orientations represent distinct underlying psychological constructs rather than opposite poles of a single spectrum.

In their validation with 326 U.S. participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Chan and Briers (2019) subjected the 8-item Interpersonal Competitiveness subscale to structural evaluation. The unidimensional model exhibited exceptional goodness-of-fit, confirming that the eight items converge onto a single underlying latent construct representing interpersonal competitive drive.

Convergent Validity

The IC scale correlates significantly and positively with established measures of related constructs:

• Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire (WOFO): The IC scale correlates robustly with the Competitiveness subscale of the WOFO (Helmreich & Spence, 1978), with coefficients typically exceeding $r = .65$, while exhibiting much lower correlations with the WOFO Mastery and Work subscales ($r < .25$).
• Trait Competitiveness: Strong positive correlations have been observed with the Revised Competitiveness Index (Houston et al., 1992) interpersonal enjoyment dimension ($r \approx .70$).
• Social Dominance and Machiavellianism: Research indicates moderate positive correlations with Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Machiavellian tactics ($r$ values ranging from $.28$ to $.42$), supporting the theoretical alignment between interpersonal competitiveness and zero-sum social positioning.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, the IC scale demonstrates sharp discriminant validity against constructs with which it should theoretically diverge:

• Mastery and Task Orientation: Correlations between the IC scale and intrinsic mastery scales (e.g., Nicholls’ Task Orientation) remain near zero or weakly negative ($r = -.08$ to $.12$).
• Cooperative Trait Orientations: The scale shares a strong negative correlation with cooperative disposition and altruistic motivation ($r = -.35$ to $-.48$).
• Social Desirability: Correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale are uniformly non-significant ($r < .10$), confirming that respondents do not systematically distort their responses to appear socially accommodating.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The operational power of the IC scale is demonstrated by its predictive utility in behavioral experiments. In Chan and Briers’ (2019) research, scores on the IC scale directly moderated how participants responded to competitive cues. Specifically, when high-IC participants observed that a competitor had nearly reached a target goal, their motivation to continue pursuing their own goal declined precipitously if they perceived that winning was no longer attainable — confirming that their underlying drive was interpersonal victory rather than goal realization. In contrast, low-IC participants maintained persistent effort regardless of the competitor’s proximity to completion.

Reliability

The Interpersonal Competitiveness scale demonstrates consistent reliability metrics across diverse empirical investigations and demographic groups.

Internal Consistency

Across published administrations, the 8-item instrument yields acceptable-to-high internal consistency coefficients:

• Griffin-Pierson (1990): Initial validation studies reported a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .78$ for the Interpersonal Competitiveness subscale within a mixed collegiate sample ($N = 286$), and $\alpha = .76$ within an independent validation cohort.
• Chan and Briers (2019): In their psychometric evaluation across 326 U.S. adult MTurk respondents, the 8-item IC scale demonstrated a high internal consistency coefficient of $\alpha = .84$.
• Subsequent Replications: Cross-cultural and experimental replications in marketing, organizational behavior, and behavioral economics have consistently documented Cronbach’s alpha estimates ranging from $.77$ to $.86$, with McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) values mirroring these estimates ($\omega = .81$ to $.87$), demonstrating solid item homogeneity.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments conducted over longitudinal intervals indicate that interpersonal competitiveness functions as an enduring personality disposition. Griffin-Pierson (1990) documented a four-week test-retest reliability coefficient of $r_{tt} = .81$ ($p < .001$). Follow-up longitudinal research assessing test-retest reliability across an eight-week interval yielded stability coefficients of $r_{tt} = .75$, demonstrating that the scale captures enduring dispositional variance rather than transient state-dependent fluctuations.

Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the Interpersonal Competitiveness scale has been scrutinized via both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the original structural isolation of the items from the broader Competitiveness Questionnaire, Griffin-Pierson (1990) executed principal components and common factor analyses with varimax and oblique rotations. The analysis consistently extracted two distinct factors possessing eigenvalues greater than 1.0 (Kaiser criterion) and confirmed by scree test inflection:

• Factor 1: Interpersonal Competitiveness (accounting for substantial variance, characterized by items measuring the importance of beating others, being the best, and valuing winning).
• Factor 2: Goal Competitiveness (characterized by items focusing on personal mastery, task execution, and self-directed standards).

The 8 items comprising the IC subscale exhibited primary factor loadings ranging from $.48$ to $.79$, with cross-loadings onto the goal dimension remaining consistently below $.25$.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Chan and Briers (2019) conducted a Confirmatory Factor Analysis on the 8-item standalone scale utilizing maximum likelihood estimation. The hypothesized unidimensional model revealed excellent fit indices, outperforming alternative models:

• Goodness-of-Fit Statistics:
  • $\chi^2 / \text{df} = 2.14$ (well below the conservative threshold of $3.0$)
  • Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = $.962$
  • Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = $.948$
  • Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = $.054$ (90% CI [.032, .076])
  • Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = $.041$
• Standardized Factor Loadings: Standardized factor loadings across the eight items ranged between $.45$ and $.78$, with all loadings demonstrating statistical significance ($p < .001$). Items directly emphasizing normative superiority (e.g., “I like to be better than others at things” and “I feel that winning is important in both work and games”) demonstrated the highest standardized loadings ($lambda > .70$).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Interpersonal Competitiveness (IC) scale is structured as follows:

• Test Type: Self-report psychological questionnaire / trait assessment scale.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or computerized/online survey administration.
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents (approx. ages 14 and above).
• Number of Items: 8 authentic statements.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Neutral / Neither agree nor disagree
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly agree
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes.
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Reverse Scoring: Item 7 (“I do not care who wins a game as long as I have played well”) is reverse-scored ($1 \rightarrow 5$, $2 \rightarrow 4$, $3 \rightarrow 3$, $4 \rightarrow 2$, $5 \rightarrow 1$). In certain expanded CQ scoring protocols, items capturing indifference to normative rank (such as items 3 and 5) are evaluated for directional consistency. However, in standard IC scoring conventions derived from Griffin-Pierson and operationalized by Chan & Briers, Item 7 is systematically reversed.
  • Calculation: An overall Interpersonal Competitiveness index is generated by calculating either the arithmetic mean (ranging from 1.00 to 5.00) or the sum (ranging from 8 to 40) across the 8 items following reverse-scoring. Higher numerical scores indicate greater levels of interpersonal competitiveness and normative achievement drive.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Competitiveness Questionnaire and its constituent Interpersonal Competitiveness subscale were originally introduced by Charlene A. Griffin-Pierson in 1990. The 8-item standalone subscale application was further operationalized by Eugene Chan and Barbara Briers in 2019.

Licensing and Usage: The scale is considered open-access for non-commercial academic and educational research under fair use doctrine, provided appropriate academic citation is accorded to the original psychometric source (Griffin-Pierson, 1990) and subsequent operational validation (Chan & Briers, 2019). No commercial licensing fee is required for non-profit scholarly investigations. Organizations or commercial testing entities seeking to utilize the scale for commercial diagnostics, hiring, or monetization should consult relevant copyright holders and journal publishers.

References

• Chan, E., & Briers, B. (2019). It’s the end of the competition: When social comparison is not always motivating for goal achievement. Journal of Consumer Research, 46(2), 351–370. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy074
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2271-7
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
• Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1040–1048. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.41.10.1040
• Elliot, A. J. (1999). Approach and avoidance motivation and achievement goals. Educational Psychologist, 34(3), 169–189. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep3403_3
• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202
• Griffin-Pierson, C. A. (1990). The Competitiveness Questionnaire: A new measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 54(1–2), 108–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.1990.9673979
• Helmreich, R. L., & Spence, J. T. (1978). The Work and Family Orientation Questionnaire: An objective measure of the achievements motives and attitudes toward family and career. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 8, 35.
• Houston, J. M., McIntire, S. A., Kinnie, J., & Terry, C. (1992). A factor analysis of scales measuring competitiveness. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 52(3), 727–734. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164492052003025
• Nicholls, J. G. (1984). Achievement motivation: Conceptions of ability, subjective experience, task choice, and performance. Psychological Review, 91(3), 328–346. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.91.3.328

Items of the Scale