Relationships among Orientation to Exercise, Personality, Well-being, and Self-Efficacy among Recreational Runners

An ongoing concern of research in the psychology of sport has been how basic personality dispositions such as the dispositions that constitute the Five Factor Model (FFM) are manifested in the motivation to exercise and participate in sports.Conspicuously absent from this research has been the role that well-being and related characteristics may play in these processes.Most research assumes that individual differences in personality are manifested in individual differences in motivation (e.g., Brinkman, Weinberg, & Ward, 2016) which are then manifested in individual differences in sport and exercise participation (e.g., Ingledew & Markland, 2007).The present study examined if well-being and self-efficacy mediated relationships between personality traits and motivation in sport.The underlying rationale for this model was that well-being and self-efficacy are more general constructs than motivation in sport and exercise, and as such, they should be more proximal or direct outcomes of personality than motivation for sport and exercise is.Although some have conceptualized self-efficacy as an aspect of well-being (e.g.Ryff & Keyes, 1995), for present purposes we conceptualized self-efficacy as a characteristic adaptation as described by McAdams and Pals (2006).To our knowledge, how these constructs might mediate relationships between personality traits and motivation in sport has not been considered before.We examined these processes within a sample of individuals who exercised regularly, recreational runners.We defined recreational runners as individuals who ran frequently, not as a job, but as a form of exercise.We chose recreational runners because running is a popular form of exercise whose popularity has grown in the past decades (e.g., Breedveld, Scheerder, & Borgers, 2015), and so our findings would have more generalizability than if we studied individuals who participated regularly in a less popular sport such as water sports (e.g., Physical Activity Council, 2017).Moreover, there appears to be considerably variability in how often and how much people run (e.g., Paul, 2018), which presumably reflects variability in people's motives.We measured personality using the BFI-44 (John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) a widely used measure of Marzena Cypryańska* John B.