Human Agency at Work: From Agentic Development to Agentic Organizing

Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory has profoundly shaped organizational research, yet its influence has flowed almost entirely through a single construct: self-efficacy. His mature theory of human agency, defined as people’s capacity to intentionally influence the nature and quality of their lives, remains strikingly underused in organizational scholarship. The theory offers largely untapped machinery: four agentic properties (intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness), three modes of agency (personal, proxy, and collective), and a model of reciprocal determinism in which agents and environments continuously co-construct one another. This Research Topic carries forward the legacy of Albert Bandura (1925–2021) by extending his work on human agency into organizational settings. In an era of technological disruption, AI-mediated work, and continuous organizational change, these ideas speak directly to how people, teams, and organizations intentionally construct their futures rather than merely react to them. Building on the Agentic HRD framework, its Hope-Action Theory, and its Hopeful Career State construct, this Research Topic extends human agency theory toward what we term Agentic Organizing: how organizational actors, individually and collectively, exercise agency to construct future organizational conditions, with organizations understood as entities continuously produced through personal, proxy, and collective agency.This Research Topic aims to reopen and advance Bandura’s human agency theory as an explanatory framework for organizational life. It invites conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions that explain how intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness, expressed through personal, proxy, and collective agency, shape future-oriented cognition, intentional enactment, and organizational outcomes such as engagement, adaptation, innovation, and retention.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:o The psychology of human agency at work, distinguishing it from self-efficacy, proactivity, autonomy, and self-regulationo Personal, proxy, and collective agency, and how these modes interact across individuals, supervisors, teams, and organizationso Future-oriented agentic states, such as the Hopeful Career State, and their links to engagement, adaptation, innovation, mobility, and retentiono Leadership and agentic organizing: how leaders and supervisory systems create conditions for others to exercise agencyo Agency under constraint and disruption, including restructuring, precarious employment, and limited autonomyo AI and technologically mediated agency, and its role in shaping collective future constructiono Agency in gig, platform, and non-standard employment, where organizational structures are thin or algorithms replace managerso Teams and collective agency in constructing shared intentions and coordinated actiono Agentic development and interventions, including HRD, coaching, and career developmento Agency in organizational change, innovation, and entrepreneurshipo Measurement and methods for agentic processes, including longitudinal, diary, multilevel, and computational designsThis Research Topic is anchored specifically in Bandura’s human agency theory; work from other agency traditions (e.g., principal-agent theory, structuration theory) is welcome only when it substantively engages Bandura’s agentic properties and modes. This is not a general outlet for positive organizational psychology: hope, resilience, or well-being must be framed within an explicit agentic mechanism. Topic editors: Hyung Joon Yoon, Sungsik Ahn, Yongho Park Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85623/human-agency-at-work-from-agentic-development-to-agentic-organizing