The formula to estimate a correlation between one composite variable and one external variable is:
$$\rho_{Xy}=\frac{\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}y}}{\sqrt{\frac{1}{k_{x}}+\frac{k_{x}-1}{k_{x}}\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}x_{j}}}}$$
and the formula to estimate the correlation between two composite variables is:
$$\rho_{XY}=\frac{\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}y_{j}}}{\sqrt{\frac{1}{k_{x}}+\frac{k-1}{k_{x}}\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}x_{j}}}\sqrt{\frac{1}{k_{y}}+\frac{k_{y}-1}{k_{y}}\bar{\rho}_{y_{i}y_{j}}}}$$
where \(\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}y}\) and \(\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}y{j}}\) are mean correlations between the x variables and the y variable(s),
\(\bar{\rho}_{x_{i}x_{j}}\) is the mean correlation among x variables,
\(\bar{\rho}_{y_{i}y_{j}}\) is the mean correlation among y variables,
\({k}_{x}\) is the number of x variables, and \({k}_{y}\) is the number of y variables.