The Achievement-Striving Facet (Conscientiousness).
Achievement-Striving is the facet behind ambition - the hunger to set goals, work toward them, and outdo yesterday. It is one of six components of Conscientiousness, and it is easy to mistake for the whole trait. It is not: a person can be intensely driven without being tidy, and a person can be reliable and well-organized without much appetite for striving.
Achievement-Striving (a facet of Conscientiousness)
Achievement-Striving is one of the six facets of Conscientiousness in the Big Five. It captures your drive to accomplish and excel: how strongly you set high goals, push yourself toward them, and want to do well and get ahead. It is about ambition and the pursuit of accomplishment rather than how tidy or reliable you are, which are separate facets.
This page explains what the Achievement-Striving facet measures, what high and low scores look like, how it sits apart from the other Conscientiousness facets, and the trade-offs at each end.
What Achievement-Striving measures
Achievement-Striving is your drive to accomplish: the tendency to set ambitious goals, hold high standards, work hard toward them, and feel a strong pull to succeed and advance. High scorers are motivated by the prospect of achievement and often define themselves partly through what they accomplish; low scorers are content with less, set easier targets, and feel little need to push past good enough.
Crucially, it is about ambition and standards, not about follow-through, tidiness, or obligation. Those belong to other Conscientiousness facets. Achievement-Striving is the part of you that wants more and aims higher, independent of how consistently you execute or how orderly you keep things.
High and low
High Achievement-Striving shows up as ambition and effort: you set demanding goals, work hard, hold yourself to a high bar, and feel restless when you are not making progress. It is a major engine of accomplishment and advancement.
Low Achievement-Striving is not the same as being lazy or a failure. Low scorers are simply less driven by accomplishment, more easily satisfied, and often more relaxed about status and getting ahead. The cost can be missed potential or low output when output is what is needed; the upside is contentment, balance, and freedom from the treadmill of always wanting more.
How it differs from the other Conscientiousness facets
Conscientiousness has six facets, and Achievement-Striving is only the drive-to-accomplish one. It is distinct from Orderliness (preference for structure and tidiness), Self-Discipline (following through on tasks against distraction), Dutifulness (sense of obligation), Self-Efficacy (belief in your competence), and Cautiousness (thinking before acting). These can diverge: a high-Achievement-Striving, low-Self-Discipline profile is the ambitious person who sets big goals but struggles to grind through the work; a low-Achievement-Striving, high-Dutifulness profile reliably does what is asked without any push to exceed it.
Trade-offs
At the high end, Achievement-Striving can tip into workaholism: never satisfied, defining worth through output, sacrificing health or relationships for goals, or burning out. At the very high end it shades toward an inability to rest. At the low end, the cost is under-reaching when more was possible. Neither pole is better - strong drive produces accomplishment while lower drive protects balance, and the useful move is to know your default and choose deliberately when to push and when enough is genuinely enough.
Also relevant: All 30 facets explained
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to score high on Achievement-Striving?
You have a strong drive to accomplish and excel - you set ambitious goals, hold high standards, and feel a real pull to succeed and get ahead. It is the "aim high and push" component of Conscientiousness, separate from how organized or reliable you are.
Is low Achievement-Striving the same as being lazy?
No. Low Achievement-Striving means being less driven by accomplishment and more easily satisfied, not failing to function. Low scorers can be perfectly reliable and capable; they simply do not feel a strong need to push past good enough or to chase getting ahead.
How is Achievement-Striving different from Self-Discipline?
Achievement-Striving is the ambition - wanting to accomplish and excel; Self-Discipline is the follow-through - actually doing the work against distraction. They often pair up but can split: a high-ambition, low-discipline person sets big goals yet struggles to execute them.
How do I find my Achievement-Striving score?
Our 300-item Big Five test scores all 30 facets, including Achievement-Striving, against population norms; the 120-item form also resolves the facets. The shorter 50-item and 10-item forms give your Conscientiousness trait score but do not break it into facets.
References
- Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1995). Domains and facets: Hierarchical personality assessment using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment, 64(1), 21-50.
- Roberts, B. W., Chernyshenko, O. S., Stark, S., & Goldberg, L. R. (2005). The structure of conscientiousness: An empirical investigation based on seven major personality questionnaires. Personnel Psychology, 58(1), 103-139.
- Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
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