[1] Kobasa described a pattern of personality characteristics that distinguished managers and executives who remained healthy under life stress, as compared to those who developed health problems.
In the following years, the concept of hardiness was further elaborated in a book[2] and a series of research reports by Salvatore Maddi, Kobasa and their graduate students at the University of Chicago.
[3][4][5][6][7][8] In early research on hardiness, it was usually defined as a personality structure that functions as a resistance resource in encounters with stressful conditions.
He conceives of hardiness as a broad personality style or generalized mode of functioning that includes cognitive, emotional, and behavioural qualities.
[11] Early conceptualizations of hardiness are evident in Maddi's work, most notably in his descriptions of the ideal identity and premorbid personality.
Like other existential psychologists before him, Maddi believed that feelings of apathy and boredom, and inability to believe in the interest-value of the things one is engaged in—feelings that characterised modern living—were caused by upheavals in culture and society, increased industrialization and technological power, and more rigidly differentiated social structures in which people's identities were defined in terms of their social roles.
According to Maddi, people with a premorbid identity can continue with their life for a long time and ostensibly feel adequate and reasonably successful.
[9][10] According to Kobasa,[3] people high in hardiness tend to put stressful circumstances into perspective and interpret them as less threatening.
At the level of action, people high in hardiness are believed to react to stressful events by increasing their interaction with them, trying to turn them into an advantage and opportunity for growth.
Results showed that participants who scored high on hardiness had significantly higher mean antigen- and mitogen-induced proliferative responses.
Bartone and associates[33] examined hardiness levels against a full lipid profile including high-density lipoprotein, usually considered a beneficial type of cholesterol.
People vary in their levels of hardiness along a continuum from low to high, with a small percentage scoring at the extreme low/high ends.
[44] Despite their very different theoretical approaches – hardiness arose from existential psychology and philosophy, SOC has its roots in sociology, whereas locus of control, self-efficacy, and dispositional optimism are all based on a learning/social cognitive perspective – some striking similarities are present.
Hardiness and the remaining constructs of locus of control, dispositional optimism, and self-efficacy all emphasize goal-directed behaviour in some form.
For instance, in accordance with the theory of dispositional optimism,[44][45] what we expect will be the outcomes of our behaviour helps determine whether we respond to adversity by continuing our efforts or by disengagement.