avoiding writing my paper

Well, I did do a couple of hours of on-line research. The project is the last paper of this semester: an eight-ten page paper with powerpoint presentation on whatever we want of what we covered during the semester. The class is Industrial/Organizational Psych -- psychology of the work place.

Since I'm particularly interested in personality, I'm going to do a literature review of personality traits and work. Specifically, I want to look at the introversion/extroversion range. One paper that I'm reading looks at the intercorrelations between the Big Five factors: Emotional Stability (which I guess is PC for Neuroticism), Conscientiousness, Areeableness, Openness and Extraversion.

The paper posits two higher orders. The first, alpha, called "getting along" was defined as a higher order construct of socialization and getting along in a society with rules, norms, and conventions. Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability defined this higher order factor. The second, beta, he called "getting ahead", and related it to Extraversion and Openness.

Unfortunately, the author didn't define beta, "getting ahead" other than, well, "getting ahead". Later in the paper he links it to leadership and ambition, but the lack of definition of beta, compared to alpha's "socialization and getting along in society with rules, norms and conventions", is confusing.

Intuitively, I'd say that the "getting ahead" has to do with getting around the rules, making your own rules and such. The openness factor has to do with risk-taking, and extroversion, too, now that I think about it. But I don't see why the author didn't say that. (grumble)

So, well, I find all of this incredibly interesting, but I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with it yet.