Sample
The study included 139 employee-supervisor dyads recruited from multiple organizations in the United States. Employees’ ages ranged from 19 to 69 (M = 39.21, SD = 11.66), and 53% were male. Ethnic representation included 89 White, 25 Black, 12 Mixed, 11 Asian, and 2 Other. Supervisory experience with the employee varied: more than 2 years (41%), 1–2 years (23%), 6–12 months (19%), 3–6 months (9%), and less than 3 months (7%).
Instruments
The Ambition to Learn test is a multidimensional assessment created in collaboration with the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. It measures motivation and attitudes toward learning across three subdomains:
Intellectual Learning
Motivation to engage with cognitively demanding material, acquire new knowledge, and master intellectually challenging tasks.
Social Learning
Motivation to learn through others, seek feedback, observe coworkers, and acquire skills in social or collaborative contexts.
Individual Interests
Intrinsic curiosity and self-driven desire to pursue new knowledge, explore ideas independently, and deepen personal expertise.
Study
Employees completed the Ambition to Learn test and HiPeople’s Big Five scale online. After finishing the assessment, they provided supervisors with a link to complete performance ratings. Supervisors were blinded to employee scores. Only dyads with verified supervisor responses were included. Statistical analyses were conducted in Python.
Results
Criterion Validity
Correlations between Ambition to Learn subscale scores, supervisor-rated behavioral outcomes, and Big Five dimensions are reported below.
Intellectual Learning
Social Learning
The strongest relationships were observed with Conscientiousness (r = 0.510) and motivation-related outcomes, such as Shows Interest in Improving Skills and Seeks Out Knowledge Without Being Asked.
The strongest relationship was observed with Agreeableness (r = 0.570), which is consistent with the collaborative nature of social learning.
Individual Interests
Individual Interests showed the strongest association with Openness to Experience (r = 0.339). This aligns with theoretical expectations about intellectual curiosity.
Limitations: Although the Ambition to Learn test shows meaningful relationships with several supervisory ratings, the results should be interpreted with caution. The ceiling effects for Intellectual Learning and Social Learning (12.5%) and especially for Individual Interests (21.1%) indicate that many participants scored near the top of the scale, limiting the test’s ability to distinguish among highly motivated learners. Several correlations—such as those between Social Learning and overall job performance (r = 0.155) and between Individual Interests and overall job performance (r = 0.072)—were small and may not reflect practically significant relationships. To address these limitations, we are expanding item difficulty, revising items showing ceiling effects, collecting larger and more diverse samples, and incorporating additional objective performance indicators to strengthen criterion validity in future iterations of the test.