Triangle Model

Before writing on this week’s prompt, I want to make an update or a future update to a previous post. At the beginning of the semester I wrote about my internship at a medical practice where the supervisor was a poor leader and the dysfunctional working environment that came with it. I have decided to go back to the office over winter break and I’m curious to see if improvements were made by the office manager or if they are continuing to be ignored. I know the semester will be over by the time I am able to make these observations, but I think it will be interesting to find out if the organization evolved or continued at their previous status.

I want to observe the new group dynamics because I have been told they hired a few new people and a few have left. An interesting detail is that one of the new hires is the daughter of the supervisor. I’m sure this will come with new conflicts at the office. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Personally, I have not yet encountered the agent model discussed in lecture this week. However, my aunt experienced a triangle principal-agent model at her former job. She was the department leader of the design department of a company that produced display sets and organizers. She was with the company for over 10 years and worked her way up to have one of the higher up positions at the company. She was one of the highest paid employees behind the CEO, CFO, and a few other employees. She made a reputation for herself at the company for being accountable and producing quality product that impressed the clients and the company.

The players in this triangle model were my aunt, the company, and the clients of the company. My aunt was at the company for a long time and had worked with many of the same clients from the start of her job there. They grew accustom to working with her and the work she produced. My aunt wanted to make the clients happy, while making the company money and producing it at the cheapest possible means. It was a balancing act of satisfying the clients and keeping the cost and resources down for the company. The company obviously wants their clients to be happy, but not at the expense of the company’s value to save money. If she delivered a quality product to the clients that exceeded the companies predicted budget for the product then the company was not happy. However, if she made a cheaper version that satisfied the company’s predicted budget, it might have been undesirable by the clients.

Since my aunt was at the company for so long, it is reasonable to infer that she found the balance between the two agents and could satisfy everyone for a period.

Her reputation in her field surpassed the company and their competition heard about her work. This inevitably found her a new and current job doing what she did for her previous company. Her reputation was improved and later maintained at her previous company and this investment was a beneficial economic return for my aunt. It landed her a new job and secured her future in the field.


Because she was at that company for so many years, one would think that she had created and earned a permanent people for herself there.  She had an excellent reputation and delivered to her clients, but she was making too much money at the company and was replaced by someone with less experience so that the company could pay them less.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanDecember 1, 2017 at 3:35 PM

    Both of your stories are kind of sad. On the first one, what does it mean to go back for a winter job at company that you found dysfunctional when you worked there before. Is this only to make a few bucks during the intersession, in which case it is no big deal. Or does it still have long term implications - possibly with a permanent job offer down the road. I am your teacher, not an employment advisor, but I would wonder about trying something else this summer, especially if it doesn't go so well this time around.

    On your aunt, it is a very unfortunate story. One question I had - did senior management change? Sometimes turnover of the sort you described happens when a new management team comes in and they "want their own people." If that did not happen, I wonder if your aunt was offered to stay on but at a reduced salary. That itself would be an insult, but if the company is not faring as well as it had been, reducing the pay of senior people is one way to cut costs without incurring turnover. The world can be pretty cruel this way, even to people who have been good contributors during their working lifetimes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Joan RobinsonDecember 4, 2017 at 12:18 PM

      I am going back to the company for a few reasons. I want to work over winter break to make some extra money and to show I'm productive over breaks from school. I did not have time to look for a new place to work and this company reached out to me asking if I wanted to work over break. Also, due to the fact that our winter break has been reduced by a week, I will only be able to work there for 2 and a half weeks. This will not be too taxing. I have applied for many other employment opportunities elsewhere and do not plan to stay at that company for the summer or longterm.

      After asking my aunt, she told me there was a senior management change and she was replaced. I wonder if some positions and employees could have been in the discussion when the senior management changed. Maybe they could have made it part of the agreement to keep people at the positions they were at or something of the sort.

      Delete
  2. Dale MortensenDecember 4, 2017 at 8:11 PM

    Although I was not employed as long as your aunt, my reputation (not to toot my own horn) was pretty good at my leasing office as a housing consultant. Like your aunt, I too made decisions with my clients that I thought were best for the company. If that meant not pressuring them to make a decision that they were not yet comfortable making, then I used my best judgement and didn't. My mindset was that if I kept bothering someone then they would not sign and spread a bad reputation to their friends and people that were considering leasing with us. If that person didn't end up signing then corporate would question me and it would lead to, "You should do better next time ." I came to the conclusion that in end, it is impossible to always keep both sides happy in a triangle model and one just has to do their best to please both sides to the best of your abilities.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Robert Giffen Econ 490 fall 2017December 12, 2017 at 10:57 AM

    This is very interesting. Seems like your Aunt is a good role model or potential mentor. I wonder if her hardworking was a result of her liking her work or because she identified with the organization itself. Further, it seems that she really was at the top of her game. Did she have a lot of professional experience before joining this company? Since she had developed so many good relationships with clients at the other company, did they follow her to her new company?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mad Men and Group Dynamics

Reflecting on last week’s post on gift exchange and team productivity, I wanted to go back to some ideas I did not originally address in my post. An interesting factor that was present in all three articles that I did not consider was the fact that they all used young children. As discussed in class, different reasons for this could be to generate unbiased results, but more accurately to generate no socialized results. Children learn behaviors through socialization from their parents, teachers, and friends. At young ages, they are taught to share and obey authority. To avoid tainted outcomes, the situations used young children in the hopes of getting a raw and honest outcome of how children would react. In addition, if the children were older factors like the number of siblings they have, their understanding of opportunism, the value of the reward, and their preferences would drastically impact the design of the experiment. Overall, the take away from all three articles was the id...
Read more

Organization of a Committee

I am a member of the service fraternity on campus, Alpha Phi Omega, and last year I served on the 5K committee that was responsible for planning and hosting the annual APO 5K event. Every year the service fraternity hosts the 5K race to raise money for a different charity of choice. We raise donations by selling 5K shirts, a spot in the 5K, hosting fundraising events, and finding sponsors to donate funds or supplies. The committee was made up of a simple hierarchy: with our leader, then supervisor, then supporting team members (B &D 101). In total, there was 9 students on the team. Our leader tasked himself with being the contact for the charity, working with the finance chair on the budget, contacting other venders for the race, send out weekly update emails to the committee, and overseeing the progress of the supervisor. In addition, our leader dealt with most of the transaction cost of the committee. The supervisor communicated with the leader and the other team members and...
Read more