One (admittedly idealistic) solution would be to spread awareness of this dynamic and its toxicity. You can’t totally expunge it that way, but you could make it less prevalent (i.e. upper-middle managers probably can’t be saved, but it might get hard to find enough somewhat-competent lower-middle managers who will play along).
What would it look like to achieve an actually-meaningful level of awareness? I would say “there is a widely-known and negative-affect-laden term for the behavior of making strictly-worse choices to prove loyalty”.
Writing this, I realized that the central example of “negative-sum behavior to prove loyalty” is hazing. (I think some forms of hazing involve useful menial labor, but classic frat-style hazing is unpleasant for the pledges with no tangible benefit to anyone else). It seems conceivable to get the term self-hazing into circulation to describe cases like the one in OP, to the point that someone might notice when they’re being expected to self-haze and question whether they really want to go down that road.
fwiw: I was hazed in uni, and I’m actually quite happy it happened, and so are my friends who went through it. One of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
One (admittedly idealistic) solution would be to spread awareness of this dynamic and its toxicity. You can’t totally expunge it that way, but you could make it less prevalent (i.e. upper-middle managers probably can’t be saved, but it might get hard to find enough somewhat-competent lower-middle managers who will play along).
What would it look like to achieve an actually-meaningful level of awareness? I would say “there is a widely-known and negative-affect-laden term for the behavior of making strictly-worse choices to prove loyalty”.
Writing this, I realized that the central example of “negative-sum behavior to prove loyalty” is hazing. (I think some forms of hazing involve useful menial labor, but classic frat-style hazing is unpleasant for the pledges with no tangible benefit to anyone else). It seems conceivable to get the term self-hazing into circulation to describe cases like the one in OP, to the point that someone might notice when they’re being expected to self-haze and question whether they really want to go down that road.
fwiw: I was hazed in uni, and I’m actually quite happy it happened, and so are my friends who went through it. One of the most meaningful experiences of my life.