Motives have been considered as a second source of individual differences next to trait measures. In negotiation initiation research, there is accumulating evidence that personality is related to propensity to initiate negotiations. To our knowledge, no previous study investigated if explicit motives are associated with the propensity to initiate negotiations. With this research, we close this research gap and add on to the literature by concurrently investigating if trait measures of personality as well as motivational measures of personality are associated with negotiation initiation. To that end, we conducted two studies (N = 101, and N = 359) with self-report (Study 1) and vignettes (Study 2) to measure negotiation initiation. In general, we found support for our hypotheses. We add to the literature by demonstrating that explicit motives and traits should not be used interchangeably and that traits and explicit motives might have complementary effects on negotiation initiation. We also report practical implications of our study.