When Agency Is Other-Focused: Agency-Granting as a Self-Presentational Strategy

Abstract: Self-presentation is traditionally understood through two fundamental dimensions: agency and communion. Agency reflects an “I” orientation emphasizing competence and assertiveness, whereas communion reflects a “we” orientation emphasizing warmth and morality. Prior work has largely contended that agency communicates self-focus while communion signals other-focus. This paper challenges that assumption by introducing agency-granting—the use of agentic language in an other-focused manner that emphasizes facilitating others’ capacity to act, judge, and influence. Across four studies (N= 7,829), I examine how agency-granting shapes evaluation in client-facing contexts. Two field studies of 3,731 tutors and 3,348 lawyers show that agency-granting robustly predicts more favorable client evaluations, above and beyond established facets of agency and communion. Two preregistered experiments using physician profiles establish a causal effect of agency-granting on provider selection likelihood and show that perceived self-determination mediates this relationship. Together, these findings demonstrate how agentic content can be deployed in an other-focused way.

Keywords: agency, self-determination, impression management, self-presentation