Hardiness and Thinking Styles: Implications for Higher Education

Abstract

The principal objective of this study was to investigate the predictive power of thinking styles for hardiness—a healthy personality disposition. Four hundred (146 males and 254 females) students from a large, comprehensive university in Shanghai, the People’s Republic of China, responded to the Thinking Styles Inventory-Revised II (Sternberg, Wagner, & Zhang, 2007) and the hardiness scale (Bartone, Ursano, Wright, & Ingraham, 1989). Results showed that after students’ age and gender were controlled for, creativity-generating styles (also known as Type I styles) and a style that allows students to work in collaboration with others (i.e., external style) positively contributed to hardiness, whereas norm-favoring styles (also known as Type II styles) and a style that denotes a lack of discipline and planning (i.e., anarchic style) negatively contributed to hardiness. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to university students, faculty members, and for university senior managers.