Personality, motivation, and performance: A theory of the relationship between individual differences and information processing.

We introduce a model to relate the personality dimensions of introversion-extraversion, achievement motivation, and anxiety to efficient cognitive performance. We show how these personality dimensions in combination with situational moderators (e.g., success, failure, time pressure, incentives, time of day, and stimulant drugs) affect the motivational constructs of arousal and effort. We propose a general information-processing model that accounts for the systematic effects of these motivational states on certain task components (sustained information transfer and some aspect of short-term memory). We combine empirical generalizations about task components in a structural model and derive testable predictions that differentiate alternative motivational hypotheses. There are two major approaches to the study of human intellectual performance. The first focuses on the effect of personality and individual differences, and the second attempts to The order of authorship is arbitrary. This research was