It seems to me what you call “agent-principal” problem has been described by Karl Marx already in the mid-1800s 
If the memory of my socialist upbringing serves me right (I was born in the socialist part of Germany before the Berlin Wall came down) he called it the problem of “surplus value”. Surplus value is the difference between the value that the company owner receives for a good minus the cost of labor they paid for. The desire to maximise that surplus value by lowering labor costs is the “capitalist cardinal sin” in Marx’ economic theory and the cause of the misery of the working class.
In the tradition of socialist economists, there is a lot of material on this topic. The phenomenon @cedric describes fits what Marx and his successors in the socialist lineage call “alienation”, which is the phenomenon that unlike traditional artisans, factory workers (and by extension, office workers) are not reaping the benefits of their own labor and lack autonomy and meaning in their work because they don’t “own the means of production”.
Socialist economic theory might not be the most obvious place to look for answers on this particular problem, but it is a very rich source if you want to go there. (Obviously, with the huge caveat that it is only worth looking into their problem analysis, the proposed solutions have not stood the test of time very well, not the least in my own birth country!)