Could you evaluate this motivation letter in terms of quality of English and academic writing? Thanks.

Dear XX,

My limitless curiosity and sincere interest in ‘predicting team performance and characteristic team success’ urged me to send this motivation letter regarding PhD position with the research project in ‘XX’ at XX University. My qualifications properly fit this PhD position since I have the strengths being necessary to be successful in this position. My strengths stem from my successful academic education with different backgrounds, my limitless desire to learn the ability of a team to solve a task and team success, my advanced (experimental) research, statistics and academic writing skills, my practical and research experience and lastly my personality characteristics.

Following successful completion of two Bachelor Degrees in ‘Psychology’ and ‘International Trade & Business Administration’ with honoured degree and scholarship, I successfully accomplished Work and Organisational Psychology Master Degree. At the moment, I am excitedly ready to commence my career in a PhD position that certainly allows me to learn more about teams and to discover new insights by using my advanced research skills in researches. Considering my reason to apply to this research project, I have a high curiosity on why some teams are more successful and how to predict future team performance. Secondly, organisations highly need high performing teams by fast changing business environment and technology. Thus, it is an emergent topic to search for characteristics of team success. Thirdly, I will be really appreciated by contributing to the field and by sharing knowledge with other scholars and practitioners. Lastly, this crucial career step helps me to progress through my future career goal since I would like to become a professional researcher or professor researching and learning more about teamwork, team success and predicting team future performance.

Regarding my high interest in collective intelligence in teams, after finishing my master degree, I have mostly spent my time on searching for preeminent research topics on teamwork. Collective intelligence totally grabbed my attention since collective intelligence can be helpful to know how a group is able to solve a task, to predict future performance of a team on varied tasks and also to know why some groups characteristically are more successful resulting in higher performance. However, recently, predictors and correlated variables of team collective intelligence are not known well except social sensitivity, moderate level cognitive diversity and frequent communication. Thus, in order to find predictors of collective intelligence in a team, by taking into consideration of modern organisation needs, I would like to conduct researches on how team cognition, team structure, team attitude, multiple team membership, team norms, team personality and team member communication influence collective intelligence. In addition, regarding the research design, I prefer to establish experimental research design to have causal relationship and to control extraneous variables. Overall, I intend to take a step forward my researches on teams in order to learn and discover new insights on collective intelligence by taking place in your exciting research project which suits my research interests.

In my research internship, with the passion of learning about why some teams have higher performance, I chose ‘teamwork’ as my master thesis topic. According to my research interests, my master thesis is highly related to the topic of collective intelligence. Explaining my thesis, with strong motivation and enjoyment, I firstly discuss that whether team members’ attitude such as team helping behavior has a correlation with strong shared mental model. This analysis aims to show whether team helping behavior leads to an efficient coordination, collaboration and communication in a team by building a strong shared mental model. Additionally, this analysis is important for collective intelligence studies since helping behavior is facilitated by social sensitivity(theory of mind) which is one of the significant factor of collective intelligence. In the second part of my thesis, I concentrated on the effect of team cognition including shared mental model and transactive memory system. This analysis aims to demonstrate how team cognition process relating to team coordination and communication is influential to achieve higher team performance. Similarly to collective intelligence studies, this analysis can be helpful to understand that how shared mental model creating coordination positively affects team collective intelligence. According to the data analysis, the data was collected by individuals and then it was aggregated to the team level. Regarding the research design, experimental research design was used with more than one experimental conditions by including manipulations.

Beside of my high interest in ‘collective intelligence in teams’, my strengths demonstrating my suitability with specific examples can be ordered below;

-Firstly, my curiosity, ambition and commitment to the task that I am dealing with lead me to search for more about the task. These characteristics help me to collect much more information about the task even when there is too much workload. In research projects, this working style makes me always deliver more than expected, see possible connections between different perspectives, bring new ideas and creative research questions. Giving example, while working as a project team member besides my studies, since I did high volume data collection and brought new perspectives into the project, I was rewarded for two times. Giving another example, in my master degree, I read more than expected number of articles which are essential for the topic. Thus, I analyzed the topic with different and important theories, varied statistics analysis and different variables. In summary, because of having these characteristics, I devote myself to a project by having passion of learning even if there is a difficulty.

-Considering from another angle, I am a detail-oriented person working in an organised and self-disciplined way. These characteristics help me to be careful on the task in return of preventing from errors and having a broad understanding. Thus, I analyze the data with reliable and accurate results. Moreover, being self-disciplined and organised allows me to set specific goals and to finish my task on time. In the long-term, I show the benefit of having these qualifications. For instance, I am graduated with distinction and I was ranked in second place in my bachelor degree. Also, my grades in ‘Experimental Psychology’ and ‘Psychological Assessment’ are A+ in my ‘Psychology’ Bachelor degree. In my master degree, I obtained a very good result in ‘Organisation and Cognition’ course. Overall, focusing on details with organised and disciplined working style helps me to have extra-curricular knowledge with high-level theoretical understanding.

-Lastly, with regard to my quick learning ability and being highly eager to develop my skills, I have essential research, statistics and academic writing skills which are useful in a research project. During the academic education and at work, I conducted many experimental research projects with my own initiative under a supervisor. In these projects, I designed surveys by using Qualtrics and Google Survey. While analyzing the data, I used SPSS and R as statistics program. By getting valuable feedback and advice from supervisors, I developed advanced research, data analysis and statistics skills. I have knowledge in multilevel analysis, longitudinal analysis, SEM, ANOVA, regression, factor and cluster analysis and other statistics analysis. Regarding academic writing skills, I took several courses given by the university to improve my writing skills. During bachelor and master degrees, I wrote many reports with high grades and presented these reports in a group. Thus, these skills makes me well-qualified researcher. Giving example, the committee consisting of professors chose my (experimental) research project (XX) and I presented my research project in the national psychology conference.

As a final point, I would like to highlight essential features in my application. Firstly, as my curriculum vitae illustrates, I have experience in experimental researches and statistics through my academic education and at work. In addition, I am still following several lectures and courses to learn more about statistics and research in social sciences. Beyond these skills, secondly, I voluntarily involved in projects as a project team member in more than one team including team members from other disciplines. In projects, all team members used an online team platform enabling team members to share their work and to see each others’ work. For instance, we arranged a group presentation and a report in an online team platform that group members can work and communicate together. With this opportunity, I directly experienced an online platform for teams and also I observed how multiple team membership can be advantage or disadvantage for a team. Thirdly, regarding teaching experience, at my volunteer job, one of my responsibility was to teach new employees about their new tasks and responsibilities. Lastly, with regard to having double degree education in two different disciplines and working in a team consisting people with different backgrounds, I am eager and familiar with working and studying in a multidisciplinary environment. Thus, I can fruitfully contribute my research skills, observations and direct experiences to your research project. Regarding my skills and experiences, I am highly self-reliant and motivated to take the responsibility for being placed in this exciting research project under your supervision.

Consequently, I offer high quality and reliable work results, limitless curiosity on collective intelligence in teams and commitment to this breathtaking research project combined with advanced research and statistics skills. I am impatiently excited to start searching, conducting experiments and finding new insights about collective intelligence in teams by bringing my contribution to the field.

I am enclosing two recommendation letters, my curriculum vitae and transcripts from bachelor and master degrees for your review.

Thank you very much in advance for your time and consideration, and I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely yours,

XX