A personal sense of agency is one of those concepts that sounds abstract until you realise how deeply it shapes everyday life. Simply put, it is the feeling that I am directing my own actions. That my choices matter. That I am not merely reacting to circumstances, but actively shaping my path within them.

When people have a strong sense of agency, they feel connected to what they do. Even when conditions are difficult, they experience themselves as participants rather than passengers. When agency is weakened, work begins to feel heavy, draining, and disconnected from identity.

Personal Sense of Agency in Everyday Life

In general terms, a personal sense of agency is about authorship. It is the belief that:

• I can make decisions.
• I can influence outcomes.
• I can choose how I respond, even when I cannot control everything.

Agency does not mean unlimited freedom. All of us operate within constraints – economic, social, cultural, institutional. Agency lives in the space within those constraints. It is the difference between feeling trapped by circumstances and feeling able to move, adapt, or resist in small but meaningful ways.

When people lose a sense of agency, they often experience:

• exhaustion without fulfilment
• anxiety about doing the “wrong” thing
• a feeling of being controlled by systems or expectations
• emotional detachment from their work

When agency is present, people tend to show more resilience, creativity, and motivation – not because work is easy, but because it feels self-directed.

Why Agency Is Central to Freelance Work

For freelancers, personal sense of agency is not a luxury, it is foundational. Many people choose freelance or independent work precisely because they are seeking agency: control over time, autonomy in decision-making, and alignment between who they are and how they work.

Freelancing can strengthen agency in powerful ways:

• choosing which clients to work with
• deciding how work is delivered
• setting boundaries around time and energy
• shaping a professional identity outside traditional hierarchies

This is the appeal of independent work: the sense that my work reflects me.

However, freelance work can also threaten agency.

Digital platforms, rating systems, opaque algorithms, unstable income, and client power imbalances can slowly erode that sense of control. Freelancers may begin to feel managed by systems they do not understand, judged by metrics they cannot influence, and pressured to accept work that compromises their values simply to remain visible or financially secure.

This is where agency becomes fragile.

Protecting Agency in Platform-Based Freelancing

In my research and lived experience, I have seen freelancers actively work to protect their sense of agency, often in subtle, unrecognised ways.

They:

• move conversations off-platform to feel more human
• build peer networks to reduce isolation
• create their own boundaries where systems do not provide them
• decline work that threatens dignity, even at financial cost
• develop informal knowledge to navigate algorithms
• resist being reduced to ratings alone

These actions are not rule-breaking for its own sake. They are acts of self-preservation. They are about protecting what Petriglieri and colleagues call the vital working self – the part of identity that feels alive, meaningful, and whole through work.

When freelancers work around rigid structures, they are often not chasing advantage. They are trying to remain connected to themselves.

Why This Matters Beyond Freelancing

Understanding personal sense of agency has implications far beyond individual wellbeing. It matters for:

• HR professionals engaging independent talent
• organisations relying on flexible workforces
• platform designers shaping digital labour
• policymakers thinking about the future of work

Work that systematically undermines agency may still function economically, but it extracts an invisible emotional cost. Over time, that cost shows up as burnout, disengagement, and quiet withdrawal.

Work that supports agency, on the other hand, creates resilience, not just in individuals, but in systems.

A Closing Reflection

Personal sense of agency is not about having complete freedom. It is about having enough room to act with dignity, intention, and choice.

For freelancers, agency is both the reason they choose independent work and the thing they must constantly defend. For organisations and platforms, recognising this is not optional. It is central to ethical engagement in an evolving world of work.

When people can see themselves in their work – not just perform tasks, but inhabit their roles – agency becomes the anchor that allows flexibility without fragmentation.

And in a world increasingly shaped by systems, metrics, and algorithms, protecting that sense of agency may be one of the most important forms of work we do.

References:

Petriglieri G, Ashford SJ and Wrzesniewski A (2018) Agony and ecstasy in the gig economy: cultivating holding environments for precarious and personalized work identities. Administrative Science Quarterly 64: 124–170