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I've only been in industry, not academia, though I have heard many anecdotal stories similar to yours. In industry, you need to produce. A manager is measured by how much he/she produces, which means how much his/her team produces. So, you could have an asshole manager, but push it too hard and you'll cause too much churn (people leaving your team), which then greatly reduces your productivity until it hits zero. If you're an asshole on top of not making the team produce, you'll be very quickly out of a job. Probably more common is that managers are polite but incompetent. You might have ones who do as little as possible and stay out of people's way, or those that try to micromanage everything. Either way, not providing a lot of value, but as it's about par for many companies, they'll keep their jobs. And then sometimes you get managers who really are great and you love working for them and they help everyone on the team grow and become super-productive. And you might even follow them around as they switch companies just so you can continue to work for them. Oh, sorry, so I will add that this depends on the company culture, so there might be companies where the culture is just abusive, and everyone at the company is just an asshole. People will show up, decide they don't like it and leave right away, leaving only the assholes to all enjoy each other's company. |