Scoring Agency and Communion Subdimensions from Big Five Items and Facets

Agency and communion have been identified as the “basic modalities of human existence” (Abele & Wojciszke, 2014; Bakan, 1966). Although the agency and communion personality framework has not been as widely adopted as the Big Five framework for organizational psychology applications, it has been useful for studying organizational psychology constructs such as well-being (Buchanan & Bardi, 2015; Helgeson, 1994). Just as the Big Five traits have lower-order facets, agency and communion have subdimensions (i.e., assertiveness, competence, warmth, morality; Abele et al., 2016). Having emerged from interpersonal psychology literature, this framework could be useful for understanding people at work in an interpersonal context. Therefore, to make the agency and communion framework more accessible to researchers, this study develops and demonstrates the application of two approaches for scoring agency and communion facets from existing Big Five data. First, an item-scoring procedure was developed by integrating a target scale approach, rater consensus approach, and factor analyses. Second, a facet-scoring procedure was developed through LASSO regression and leave-one-out cross-validation. Following the scoring procedures outlined in this paper, researchers can score agency and communion subdimensions (i.e., assertiveness, competence, warmth, and morality) using existing Big Five data.