The Impact of Agreeableness Trait on Volunteer Service Motivation and Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Study of Chinese College Students

How to continuously motivate college students to participate in voluntary activities has always been one of the burning issues in the field of educational psychology research. Based on the activation theory, this study constructed and tested a moderated mediation model to explore how to improve college students’ volunteer service motivation and behavior from the perspective of agreeableness traits and examined the moderating role of social support. By collecting three-wave time lagged data from 408 Chinese college students (59.6% female, age 18–22, means = 19.8, SD = 1.2), SPSS and Amos software were used to test the research hypotheses and the whole model. The results show that agreeableness traits of college students have a significant positive influence on their volunteer service motivation and behaviors. Volunteer service motivation mediates the positive influence of agreeableness traits on volunteer service behaviors. The social support perceived by college students positively moderates the impact of agreeableness traits on their volunteer service motivation and then promotes their volunteer service behaviors. These findings not only enrich the research literature on college students’ personality traits, volunteer service, and social support, but also provide some suggestions on how to motivate college students to participate in volunteer service from the three aspects of personality, motivation, and social support.