Agency is the capacity to act. More specifically, it’s the capacity to act intentionally and deliberately under conditions of uncertainty and constraint.
Uncertainty and constraint come in many flavors – organizational, cultural, personal, social, environmental, technical, and more. And they show up in many ways everyday. In changing conditions and requirements, authority granted or withheld, boundaries on roles, limited resources, unspoken norms, trust or distrust, burnout. All these and more open and close what a person can actually do at any given moment.
Agency is an ancient concept. It’s fundamental to what it means to be human, and every major tradition has reckoned with it. One’s relationship to the divine, questions of free will and moral responsibility, ideas of the autonomous individual, modern psychology and cognitive science questions about how minds initiate, monitor, and take ownership of action – agency is at the heart of all this.
Closer to home, organizational and leadership theories wrestle with the concept on a smaller scale. Authority, autonomy, delegation, chain of command, command and control, engagement – agency is at the heart of these and more at work.
For collaboration and conflict handling, agency is the capacity you have to notice the handling moment as it’s happening, and to choose your response rather than simply react to it.
« Back to Glossary Index