Events

Ms. Bushra Guenoun
Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior
Harvard Business School

Research on self-presentation has largely focused on how it signals the presenter’s personal attributes, such as warmth and competence. I argue that self-presentation also signals how interaction with the presenter is likely to unfold. I introduce agency-granting, a form of selfpresentation through which people signal that the other party will have meaningful influence over how interaction unfolds. Across four studies (N = 9,187), including field studies of 3,731 tutors (Study 1) and 2,708 lawyers (Study 2), I examined agency-granting in professional service contexts. Professionals’ agency-granting in client-facing profiles predicted more favorable evaluations above and beyond their expressions of competence, warmth, assertiveness and morality. Two preregistered experiments (Studies 3–4) established causal effects: participants were more likely to choose professionals who engaged in agency-granting because agencygranting increased participants’ sense of self-determination. Moreover, without agency-granting, clients anticipated less self-determination with higher- versus lower-status professionals; with agency-granting, this gap narrowed, yielding a stronger indirect effect of agency-granting on evaluation through self-determination for higher-status professionals. These findings advance research on professional–client relationships and extend theories of self-presentation by showing that audiences use self-presentational cues not only as a portrait of the presenter, but also as a preview of their own influence in future interactions.