[juhanima]

It seems to me like a law of nature that every managerial function seeks to increase its influence and headcount by definition. Without a constant and vigilant effort to keep this tendency in check, every managerial organization will keep growing and adding bureaucracy just to justify its own existence and increase its reach and power.

I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy.

Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.

[JimboOmega]

There are many situations, especially as a middle manager, where you are incentivized to play organizational games more than actually deliver.

We (I'm a middle manager myself) Aren't stupid, so we will.

More headcount and influence means more (at least potential) business impact, and often promotions. If the organization encourages us to fight with other managers to get more of that, that's what we'll do instead of running our organizations better.