Abstract
For the many people who’ve come to hate Drew Rosenhaus over the years, his 2011 appearance on 60 Minutes did nothing to improve his image. Representing players on just about every team in the NFL (National Football League), including some of the biggest names in the game, Rosenhaus is unquestionably football’s most powerful agent; when he was still only 29, he became the first agent ever to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. But he’s known as much for his larger-than-life personality and bare-knuckle tactics as for the record-breaking deals he’s been able to get for his star clients. In fact, he was the model for Jerry Maguire’s backstabbing boss in Jerry Maguire, and proudly titled his memoir A Shark Never Sleeps. So when he said on national television that he really believed that the NFL would fall apart without him, he was playing true to type, and many football fans immediately wrote off his comment as just the latest ravings of a blowhard. His statement sounded absurd: how can an agent, let alone one as belligerent and divisive as Rosenhaus, be holding together the entire league? But Rosenhaus proceeded to explain why he was simply stating the truth. “When it breaks down between the team and the player, the agent is there to pick up those pieces,” he told his interviewer.
THE ROLE: Usually middlemen bring people together, but sometimes people who already know each other are better off communicating through a middleman who insulates them from blame. This happens when speaking directly and on your own behalf makes you seem too greedy, self-promotional, or confrontational. An effective Insulator can take the heat in such situations—and can also transform what might appear as a client’s selfishness into the Insulator’s altruism.
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Notes
Neeru Paharia, Karim S. Kassam, Joshua D. Greene, and Max Bazerman, “Dirty Work, Clean Hands: The Moral Psychology of Indirect Agency,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109 (2009): 134–41.
Gabriel Rossman, “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange,” Sociological Theory 32, no. 1 (May 2014): 43–63.
Mikhail Drugov, John Hamman, and Danila Serra, “Intermediaries in Corruption: An Experiment,” Experimental Economics 17, no. 1 (March 2014): 78–99.
For a review, see Neeru Paharia, Lucas C. Coffman, and Max Bazerman, “Intermediation and Diffusion of Responsibility in Negotiation: A Case of Bounded Ethicality,” in Gary E. Bolton and Rachel T. A. Croson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 37–46.
William Finlay and James E. Coverdill, Headhunters: Matchmaking in the Labor Market (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 33.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Christina T. Fong, Robert B. Cialdini, “Overcoming the Self-promotion Dilemma: Interpersonal Attraction and Extra Help as a Consequence of Who Sings One’s Praises,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32, no. 10 (November 2006): 362–74.
Björn Bartling and Urs Fischbacher, “Shifting the Blame: On Delegation and Responsibility,” Review of Economic Studies 79, no. 1 (2012): 67–87.
Chaim Fershtman and Uri Gneezy, “Strategic Delegation: An Experiment,” RAND Journal of Economics 32, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 352–68.
An excellent discussion of how gender norms for communal behavior hamper women in negotiation appears in the book by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Kathleen M. McGinn, “Constraints and Triggers: Situational Mechanics of Gender in Negotiation,” Journal of Personality anâ Social Psychology 89, no. 6 (2005): 951–65
Emily T. Amanatullah and Michael W. Morris, “Negotiating Gender Roles: Gender Differences in Assertive Negotiating are Mediated by Women’s Fear of Backlash and Attenuated when Negotiating on Behalf of Others,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 2 (2010): 256–67.
Scott Wiltermuth, “Cheating More When the Spoils Are Split,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 115, no. 2 (July 2011): 157–68
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© 2015 Marina Krakovsky
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Krakovsky, M. (2015). The Insulator. In: The Middleman Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-53020-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-53020-2_7
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