How to Develop and Maintain Individual Agency in Corporate Sector?
The authors (Pavel Sorokin, Irina Afanaseva, Valeria Shmaevka, Daria Pavlyuk) noted that the issue of agency (enterprise, initiative) is one of the central ones for the corporate sector. The key factor determining the importance of this issue is the processes of ‘destructuration’, that is, the growth of variability in the forms of social organization in various spheres of public life.
The authors identified three levels of proactive behavior in the corporate environment: 1) at the level of the company as a whole and at the level of the team within the company; 2) at the individual level in the area of interaction between the main organizational structure of the company and the external environment in terms of recruiting and mobilizing the workforce; 3) in alternative forms of attracting human resources without concluding an employment contract (crowdsourcing, consumers, users).
According to the study, the most effective solutions in the field of agency development at the organizational level are systems that support participation in the implementation and dissemination of innovations; organizational culture; promoting knowledge exchange within the company; comfortable social environment; corporate training (mentoring) systems; unified corporate digital environment that allows each employee to build their own individual career trajectory; external motivation. Creative team building, environment in offices, and special technological tools make it possible to effectively organize the joint work of employees and maintain interactions both within the team and between teams within the structure.
The demand for agency on the part of companies is also expressed by the fact that the corporate sector is forced to massively rely on platform employment. Platform employment presupposes that people have the skills of independence, agency, stress resistance, adaptation to difficult circumstances and ability to cooperate and build social capital.
Another form of demand for the development of alternative agency that comes from companies and corporations is crowdsourcing. This concept can be defined as the transfer of certain job functions and responsibilities to the people without concluding an employment contract. This mechanism helps companies not waste their resources on hiring permanent employees or freelancers, and also provides an opportunity for everyone to take the initiative. It helps companies not only solve current problems, but also improve business processes.
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