Principal-Agent Model

Principal-Agent Model

It is tough for me to come up with an example of my own involvement in a principle-agent model because I think I have been rarely affected by it. To my memory, I generally act as the agent in the few situations I have experienced triangular principal-agent model. The retail store that I wrote about in previous blog posts will serve as my example for this particular post.

To my understanding, in order to address the prompt, I need to describe a situation where there are two principals and one agent. In the case of my example, I am the agent, or the employee, and the two principals are my manager and coordinator. Before I became a stock lead in the back, I worked as a general merchandise associate. In other words, I worked under a stock room coordinator, who worked under the manager, who also had power over me. I respected my coordinator much more, because I was around her more often and she was gentler in her requests. However, ultimately I had to carry out the orders of my head manager. The issue with this was that my stock room coordinator and my head manager did not see eye-to-eye. They agreed on the common goal of processing products and emptying out the back room in order to make room for even more products, but often differed on how this got done. This usually trickled down to me, the agent of the two principles. I was the work force, and although my coordinator helped tag clothes, she mostly acted as a supervisor, telling me what to do. She would tell me to move one pallet to the side, or start working on a pallet, or to attempt to break down one more pallet before my shift was over, and my manager would tell me otherwise, to move a pallet to a different side of the room, to start a different pallet than I was told by my coordinator, etc. Also, many times I was told by my manager to come to the front of the store and clean, as well as do other various tasks, such as change out signs to prepare for the holidays. My coordinator would get upset with this, as I was no longer available to help her with a job that is arguably more important, as well as doing the work my position entails. She would discuss this with my manager but to no avail, and I continued to do these tasks for both principles. In other words, I was the agent for both principles, who had similar goals but also differing desires for what they wanted me to do.

Overall, this seemed to slow down the back room efficiency. I couldn't fully be at my best when the principals were constantly in a state of miscommunication and disagreement. If it was up to me, I would simply work under my coordinator, who then would tell me exactly what to do, and I woud do it successfully and we would leave knowing we made a significant impact. It isn't like this with every manager; there are managers who come in, tell my coordinator to do what they feel needs to be done, and leave us alone to make the call to do the right thing and ultimately help out the business in the way we feel fit. I didn't have much say at this time, as I was simply the employee who had no choice but to do what I was told to do. Although the manager is technically above my coordinator in the ranking of management, I believe they would still both be considered principals as, although the manager has the say at the end, they both technically have authority over the agent, and the coordinator is sometimes able to sway the head manager to allow us to do things the way we feel is right.

I don't think there's much I can do to resolve the situation. The principals need to work out a system that allows them both to get what they want. This could happen by hiring another employee to do the work on the floor as opposed to me, as well as the manager allowing the coordinator to run the back room without interference. I don't think I ever failed in what I did, I simply clocked in, did what I was told, and clocked out.