The duality of personality: Agency and communion in personality traits, motivation, and behavior

Agency and communion provide a common framework to facilitate the integration of findings from diverse areas of personality psychology. Agency is a superordinate theme encompassing mastery and control; communion is centered around relatedness and sharing. Examples of agency and communion in theories of personality and in contemporary research examining motives, traits, and behavior are reviewed. Three studies were conducted to empirically demonstrate how these constructs could be explicitly used to examine different elements of personality.; By collecting the explicit goals of 154 participants, Study 1 found that the types of goals participants set and found important were related to both the need a goal was set to satisfy (agency vs. communion) and the agentic and communal dispositional characteristics of the participant. Study 2 used agency and communion to examine interpersonal behavior. One hundred and forty-four participants from the Riverside Accuracy Project (RAP; Funder, 1999) were videotaped interacting in three different social situations (unstructured, cooperative, and competitive). Results revealed that both dispositional measures of agency and communion and situations were important predictors of agentic (e.g., dominating, controlling, etc.) and communal (e.g., warmth, friendliness, etc.) behavior. Study 3 empirically linked various personality traits to the dispositions of agency and communion in a sample of 152 participants from the RAP. This study provided insight into the structure and meaning of the Five-Factor Model, social skills, empathy, and psychological well being by using agency and communion to map these traits in a two-dimensional space.; By using agency and communion to study motives, behaviors, and traits, this dissertation coordinated these three domains to obtain a more coherent picture of personality. Using this scheme, it was apparent that participants who were both agentic and communal exhibited motives, traits, and behaviors that were diagnostic of psychological well-being. Researchers attempting to gain insight and understanding into personality may benefit from using the broad constructs of agency and communion in order to unite many diverse facets of personality.