CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Personality traits are distinguishing qualities or characteristics that are the embodiment of an individual’s. They are your habitual patterns of behaviour, temperament and emotion. Skills, on the other hand, are the learned capacity to carry out specific tasks. Personality, in the other hand, is a set of individual differences that are affected by the development of an individual: values, attitudes, personal memories, social relationships, habits, and skills (McAdams & Olson, 2010; Mischel & Smith, 2004).
Academic motivation is one of the effective factors on students’ achievement. Learners need to be interested in learning; otherwise, all efforts of the educational system would fail. So, understanding and developing the knowledge about factors that affect academic motivation can help to improve educational performance. Although ability and intelligence are considered as predictors of academic achievement, there is evidence that personality variables also play a role (O’connor & Paunonen, 2007). The literature also suggests that personality traits affect the academic motivation and performance (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1992; Komarraju & Karau, 2005; Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2003, 2008). Therefore, the study tries to investigate the impact of personality traits on interpersonal dependence of undergraduate in Imo State.
There is evidence that personality traits can predict academic motivation and achievement (Costa & McCare, 1992). Grozier (1997) mentions motivation as a core trait in the Big Five factor model of personality knowing that conscientious individuals are organized, hardworking, self-disciplined, ambitious and persevering. In addition, motivation has an important influence on a learner’s learning behavior and achievement (Vallerand et al., 1992). O’Connor and Paunonen (2007) consider three rationales for the evaluation of personality traits as predictors of post-secondary students’ academic achievement. First, there are behavioral tendencies reflected in personality traits that can affect certain habits that influence academic achievement such as perseverance, conscientiousness, talkativeness. Second, whereas cognitive ability reflects what an individual can do, personality traits reflect what an individual will do. Third, personality as well as cognitive proficiency would predict subsequent performance better in older students, especially motivation-related personality variables.