Enterprise-wide systems enabling physicians to manage care

In their conceptualisation of the principal/agent relationship, Jensen and Meckling [1] were not referring to a Knowledge Worker agent. Given the prevalence of knowledge workers in today’s workforce, we extend agency theory to the context of a Knowledge Worker (KW) agent. In doing so, we argue that a key role for enterprise-wide systems, in such a context, is in facilitating the monitoring function. To test this, we investigate the dynamics of a critical principal – KW agent relationship in the healthcare industry; namely that between the managed care organisation and primary care physician. Our case study data reveals that enterprise-wide systems adopted went beyond just alleviating the agency problem, as we predicted, to enabling the KW agent to perform a new function- ‘self-monitoring’. Our results are significant to, agency relationships and the use of enterprise-wide systems with knowledge workers. © 2002 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.