Seems to me that companies want high-agency employees, but for sufficiently high values, "high-agency employee" is almost an oxymoron. If a person is very-high-agency, why shouldn't they start their own company and keep all the profit? The mere fact that someone agrees to be your employee suggests that a) they are missing some important skills, and b) they cannot compensate for the missing skills e.g. by paying someone else to do it.
OK, in real life I can imagine reasons why a very-high-agency person would become an employee. Maybe the company has a monopoly, or is willing to pay tons of money. But most probably, the given person is not strategic, and never realized they don't need a boss or they have some emotional problem with being a boss. Finding and employing such person could be a gold mine.
There are plenty of reasons to work at a company even if you are very agenty. I work at a company where any advance I make may be turned in to cash across about 700 million chips a year that we sell. It is economic for my company to have me around doing whatever I feel like as long as, on average, i spit out really tiny improvements in chips every once in a while. A company selling the equivalent of 7 million chips a year would need about 100X as much innovation from me to get the same value from me that the bigger company gets.
In addition to my screw...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.