Within-person and between-people variability in personality dynamics: Knowledge structures, self-efficacy, pleasure appraisals, and the Big Five

- Self-relevant strengths compensate for weaknesses in self-efficacy appraisals.
- Self-relevant beliefs interact with trait categories in accounting for self-efficacy.
- Self-efficacy appraisals play a mediating role in personality processes.
- Self-rated action in the future mostly depends on self-efficacy appraisals.

We investigated within-person co-variations from the perspective of knowledge-and-appraisal theories of personality. Knowledge structures were idiographically assessed as personal beliefs on the relevance of personality characteristics in facilitating successful actions in interpersonal situations. Three main findings emerged. First, beliefs of situational relevance of self-defining strengths and weaknesses show additive effects in accounting for intra-individual variability in contextualized self-efficacy appraisals. Secondly, between-person variability in Extraversion moderates within-person co-variation between self-efficacy and knowledge structures. Thirdly, self-efficacy mediates the impact of knowledge structures on perceived likelihood of performing the interpersonal behaviors in the future, after controlling for rated frequency of the same behaviors in the past. Overall, the present findings suggest that within-person and between-person approaches are complementary and need to be integrated.