RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXTROVERSION AND NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXTROVERSION AND NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT
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Relationship between Extraversion and Need for Achievement
Research has found a link between personality and the elements of behavior that influence performance, such as the choice to participate and the degree of involvement in academic activities. Extraversion is one of the 5 key personality dimensions with an influence on performance. Extraversion/extroversion generally refers to an individual’s energy and tendency to interact will other people in social settings (Zafar 2011; Kaur 2013).
Particularly, extraverts/extroverts are known to be social, talkative and emotional. These social tendencies are known to have an impact on academic performance. The extravert/extrovert is largely seen as directed to the outside world. They generally like parties and fun, always looking for excitement in nearly everything they do. In this respect, they like to study in informal settings (such as lying on the couch or seat) and take frequent breaks from studies (Cheng & Ickes, 2009).
One other factor that influences achievement is risk-taking in academic activity. Risk-taking here refers to the ability to try out new things (new languages in this case) intelligently without embarrassment, interact with others (who know the language better) and participate in class. Zafar (2011) notes that risk-taking is a key factor for success in learning a second language. However, while he found a correlation between risk-taking and participation in the classroom, he also found the relationship with actual success to be relatively weak. In other words, risk-taking helped in specific tasks, but did little when it came to longer-term success.
But this is not always the case. In examining personality differences between high achievers and low achievers among a group of engineering students, Kaur (2013) focuses on the students score on extroversion and finds that those who scored higher exhibited better performance because their social habits benefited them in collaborative studies, a key factor in engineering studies.
Ultimately, there is a general view that extraverts/extroverts are poor performers. But in some cases, as Kaur’s (2013) study shows, this is not always the case. Therefore, the influence of personality depends on context, including study goals.

Bibliography
Cheng, W & Ickes, W 2009, “Conscientiousness and self-motivation as mutually
compensatory predictors of university-level GPA.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol.47: pp. 817–822
Kaur, K 2013, “Do personality factors differentiate between high achievers and low
achievers among engineering students?” Educationia Confab, vol.2, no.6: pp.2-7
Zafar, S 2011, “A study on the relationship between extroversion-introversion and risk-taking
in the context of second language acquisition.” International Journal of Research Studies in Language Learning, vol.1, no.1: pp.33-40