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.
