Despite broad interest in the nature of ambition and its effects on career outcomes, scientific research on this issue is limited due to an inconsistent conceptualization and measurement of ambition. Consistent with theoretical views, but in contrast to most existing measurements, we conceptualize ambition as a general personal disposition and developed and evaluated a 5-item measure of ambition consistent with this conceptualization. We report a six-phase process including (1) item generation, (2) item content review by subject matter experts, (3) item reduction and selection based on a university student (N = 1074) and employee (N = 469) sample, (4) examining convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity in relation to existing ambition scales with an employee sample (N = 301), (5) establishing discriminant validity to other personal dispositions in terms of achievement striving, trait competitiveness, and future time perspective with an employee sample (N = 544), and (6) establishing re-test reliability, longitudinal measurement-invariance, and incremental criterion validity regarding objective (i.e., salary, promotions) and subjective career success (i.e., career satisfaction) with a six-month time-lagged study (N = 394). In sum, the newly developed scale should be useful for future research to improve the theoretical and empirical understanding of the nature and effects of ambition.

尽管人们对雄心勃勃的野心及其对职业发展的影响产生了广泛的兴趣，但由于雄心勃勃的野心概念和衡量方法不一致，因此对这一问题的科学研究受到限制。与理论观点一致，但与大多数现有的度量方法相反，我们将野心概念化为一般的个人性格，并开发并评估了与该概念化相符的5个项。我们报告了一个六个阶段的过程，其中包括（1）项目生成，（2）主题专家对项目内容的审查，（3）基于大学生（N  = 1074）和员工（N  = 469）样本的项目减少和选择，（4）通过员工样本检查与现有雄心力标度有关的收敛性，判别性和增量有效性（N  = 301），（5）通过雇员样本（N  = 544）建立在成就努力，特质竞争力和未来时间角度方面对其他个人倾向的判别效度（N = 544），以及（6）建立重新测试的可靠性，纵向测量六个月的时间滞后研究（N  = 394），关于客观（即薪水，晋升）和主观职业成功（即职业满意度）的不变性和增量标准效度。总而言之，新制定的量表应该对将来的研究有用，以提高对雄心的性质和影响的理论和经验理解。