The motivation to lead and competitiveness, and how both these individual differences are related to the Big 5 personality factors.

1. Lab Report

This research investigates how the Big 5 personality factors are associated with the motivation to lead and competitiveness, and how and motivation to lead and competitiveness are associated with one another.

1.1 The research topic

In this study, we will consider the motivation to lead and competitiveness, and how both these individual differences are related to the Big 5 personality factors. You will learn about the trait perspective in week 2, so we will not go into any detail about the Big 5 here. One of your starter references (DeYoung et al., 2007) will also help you to understand the Big 5 personality inventory used in this study.

Motivation to Lead:

There are three dimensions in the overall motivation to lead construct, but we are focussed only on affective-identity motivation to lead, which we will simply refer to as the motivation to lead.

We know from previous research that the Big 5 personality factors are correlated with the motivation to lead, and one of your starter references (Badura et al., 2020) will help with understanding the strength and direction of these associations.

Competitiveness:

We used a multidimensional scale (Orosz et al., 2018) that measures four dimensions of competitive orientation:

lack of interest toward competition

hypercompetitiveness

anxiety-driven competition avoidance

self-developmental competitiveness

A range of previous studies have developed measures of general competitiveness, some of which have revealed correlations with Big 5 personality factors. You will need to search the literature to understand what we know about these associations found in previous research.

Putting them together:

There may be theoretical reasons as to why the motivation to lead and general competitiveness may be related. For instance, those who are motivated to lead may be partly driven to pursue leadership roles due to their competitiveness, and those with an aversion to leadership roles may be hindered by their dislike of the competitiveness that may be involved in attaining such positions.

Remember that we are using a multidimensional measure of competitiveness, and the four different dimensions may have differing associations with personality and the motivation to lead. Part of the challenge of this lab report is choosing a dimension of competitiveness to focus on and considering how it may be linked to personality and the motivation to lead. How you wish to build a case for the relationship between these constructs is up to you, but the more you can make use of the literature to build this argument, the better.

An important step is to develop an understanding of what the Big 5 factors are. All students will need to choose one Big 5 factor to focus their report on. Which Big 5 factor you choose for your lab report is up to you, but you will need to think about how each factor might be related to the motivation to lead and the four dimensions of competitiveness.

Based on these considerations, you should choose the dimension of competitiveness that may have an association with your chosen Big 5 factor. You will then need to think about how the motivation to lead and your chosen dimension of competitiveness relate to one another. Thinking about how motivation to lead relates to your chosen dimension of competitiveness may be guided by what you know or can predict about how each of these constructs are related to your chosen Big 5 factor.