Agency and social skills: Theoretical remarks and implications for management

Though traditional theories on agency primarily considered the individual as a monad and brought to the definition of interpretative models of individual behaviour, an increased focus on the intrinsic social nature of human beings and on the influence that social exchanges exert on shared environments and on our behaviour in a dynamic and responsive context broadened the investigation of the relations between person, context, and behaviour. The construct of agency, understood as the capability to sense and judge ourselves as causal agents responsible for our behaviours and relative consequences, has then been flanked by the construct of inter-agency, understood as the ability to recognise ourselves as agents together with other social agents during shared activities. The ability to attribute to ourselves and other subjects an agentive stance (and, consequently, even a relative amount of responsibility) grounds on a complex ensemble of cognitive and perceptual processes that guides, for example, processing of information to create a proper interpretation of the social context and to regulate interpersonal dynamics. Since relationships with other social agents, team-work, and cooperation-competition dynamics are at the core of business and management activities, the need for empowering the awareness of the way we read our own and others’ behaviour, of the way we and our inter-agents plan and regulate behaviour, and of the way we perceive ourselves as intentional agents within complex social systems is deemed as critical.

Keywords: Agency, inter-agency, social skills, social interaction, neuromanagement.

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Davide Crivelli, Michela Balconi, Agentività e competenze sociali: riflessioni teoriche e implicazioni per il management in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA " 3/2017, pp 349-363, DOI: 10.3280/RIP2017-003006