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Agency is the opposite of helplessness
Learned helplessness is the belief that nothing you do matters. It leaves people passive, slow to learn they could act, and sad and anxious. Agency is built from the reverse.
Efficacy is the belief that in the here and now, you can accomplish a specific goal. Optimism is the belief that you can accomplish it not just now but into the future and the far future.
Imagination is the range of possible goals you might achieve, and the broader that range, the more agency a person has. Full-blown agency is efficacy, I can do it in the here and now, plus optimism, I can do it in the future, plus imagination, I can innovate across many different situations.
Why does believing you can act change results?
Albert Bandura introduced self-efficacy in a 1977 paper in Psychological Review. He argued that a person's belief in their ability to carry out a specific task affects which tasks they attempt, how hard they try, and how long they persist. A 1998 meta-analysis by Alexander Stajkovic and Fred Luthans combined results from 114 studies and found a positive relationship between self-efficacy and work performance.
How does imagination fit into agency?
In 1991, psychologist C. R. Snyder proposed hope theory, which defines hope in two parts. Agency is the sense of being able to act toward a goal, and pathways is the ability to think of routes to reach it. In this theory, a person blocked on one route can switch to another. Snyder published a hope scale in 1991 to measure both parts.
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