Big Five personality profiles of context-specific achievement goals

• Studied relations between personality traits and context-specific achievement goals.
• Used NEO-PI-R for a comprehensive profile of trait-goal and facet-goal relations.
• Mostly consistent findings from two samples of differing culture, age, and context.
• Results suggest that holistic personality can be used to explain achievement goal pursuit.

Over the past decade, an increasing body of literature supports the validity and utility of the 2 × 2 achievement goal framework (Elliot & McGregor, 2001). From this foundation, researchers have begun to investigate the complex antecedents and consequences underlying achievement goal pursuit. In the current studies, we investigated the relations between the Big Five personality traits and context-specific achievement goals in two different contexts (school and work). The results across both studies showed three sets of anticipated, consistent, and specific trait-goal relations. First, conscientiousness was strongly and positively related to mastery-approach goals. Second, agreeableness was positively related to mastery-approach goals and negatively related to performance-approach goals. Third, both avoidance goals and both performance goals were positively related to neuroticism.