Last week I posted about a time that I experienced conflict in the workplace, and for this week I intend to analyze it from the perspective of the Principle-Agent problem. To recap, I worked as a telemarketer soliciting donations. For each call we were supposed to do our best to capture the donations and to run through a script in order to do so. All calls were considered equally. On one particular call, I felt that it was morally wrong to convince this woman to give her money to the foundation because I knew she didn't have much she could spend and I felt that I was taking advantage of her emotions in order to take her money. I complained to my manager and they made me go through with it. Tensions escalated and after a dispute with my manager and some rather passive aggressive actions on their part, I decided to leave the company.
This is a classic example of the Principle-Agent problem, where my manager was the "Principal" and I was the "Agent". From the perspective of the Principle, it was the Agent's job was at the very least to run through the three ask amounts of the script and follow the standardized guidelines for all callers, and also for the agent's to do their best to capture a donation. These values can be broken down to serve two purposes, the first to maintain control of the process and create a standardized sense of order among the Agents, and the second as a function of revenue collection. According to the Principle, those two values were to guide the Agent's actions while on a call. From the perspective of the Agent, these values were quite clearly communicated, and more often than not did not cause a problem.
However, in this situation, in my interaction with the donor, identified a moral hazard that I did not want impose on them. By doing my job as instructed, I would collect a donation and satisfy my responsibility but I would put a significant financial burden on the donor that I did not think was ethical to do. As the only point of interaction with the donor, my self-interest challenged the Principle's expectations of my role as the Agent, and accordingly, a conflict emerged. To that extent, my problems with how the call was going was breaking the two rules that Principle set forth and thus could have been seen as a subversion of their power. This obviously upset the Principle, and put tension on the relationship between the Principle and the Agent that was eventually escalated to the point where I, as the Agent, had to leave that company and the working relationship.
Having experienced the Principle - Agent first hand, I feel that the only way to resolve that problem is to establish a feedback based, Agent - Principle relationship. Although I understand why the Principle was upset, their failure to address my complaints in engaging in the moral hazard is representative of a failure on their part to be receptive to the Agent- Principle dynamic of the relationship. Had they been more receptive to feedback, the problem would likely have been resolved rather than escalated.
Before commenting on the substance of your post, note that you are garbling principal and principle, two separate words with quite different meanings. For us, the principal is a person, while a principle is the moral of the story.
ReplyDeleteAs to your post, this did seem like a good triangle example and one where the ethics of doing your job might be questioned. It is very similar, in that sense, to an associate at a law firm offering pro bono work, when the partners frown on the associates engaging in activity that doesn't generate revenue.
I do want to note, as I commented in the previous post, that a related issue for you might have been how much time you spent on this particular call. You didn't comment on that in your last post but it seems to me if you had simply thanked this women after a few minutes and then hung up, your boss might have been bothered a little, since you went off script, but not so much, since in an opportunity cost sense not much of your time was utilized.
Put a different way, there is an implicit performance measure at root here. The question is what that measure is. Here are two possible candidates. The first is average contribution per call. The second is average contribution per hour. My sense is that your boss should have viewed the second measure as the appropriate one, in which case one call that doesn't generate a contribution is no big deal.
I also want to add here that, of course, I wasn't there and don't know what motivated your manager, who may have over reacted in the circumstance. For example, if some of the other callers were not performing well, he may have simply let his frustration out on you. Who knows?
The take away for you is that when in a triangle situation, if you as agent do value the needs of each principal, you try as best as you can to satisfy both. Sometimes it may be that what one principal wants is morally wrong, in which case ignoring the principal entirely is the right thing to do, but otherwise the agent should look to please both, if that is possible.
Apologies for the principle - principal mixup, even after reviewing my writing I have noticed that sometimes I overlook mistakes like these.
ReplyDeleteReturning to your comment about the length of the call, last week I replied regarding this by saying:
"We were encouraged to stay on the phone as long as necessary in order to capture a donation, so the amount of time was actually applauded because it was representative of a skill set that was needed for callers to collect higher level donations. Essentially, while the longer calls probably lost a few potential calls a day, they provided a training opportunity so that callers could be put on higher level campaigns where the ask amounts were in the tens of thousands of dollars instead of a few hundred."
And to further that point, while rather inefficient, we were not allowed to make the decision to end a call early unless the potential donor was verbally harassing us. Fellow callers at the time had actually been disciplined for hanging up in a situation similar to the one you described. The management cared less about performance measures than they cared about a uniform approach to calling. In my opinion this is just poor management because they could probably increase revenue by allowing callers to determine if a call is worth the time to pursue the donation, but in their defense I can imagine it would be hard to trust students with this responsibility and could that it could lead to inefficiency in that callers would make the wrong decision or shirk and thus not capturing potential donations.
I wish I knew if my manager was simply frustrated with the other callers and let it out on me, but regardless I consider that to be very unprofessional so that doesn't justify their escalation of the conflict.
I definitely agree with your take away though, and it was a learning experience for me to ask myself if I am not acting in the way the principal wants me to or if doing so is against my own prinicples (see what I did there).