[bsenftner]

Look into Cognitive Distortions, the fancy words for "how people play themselves". I've found that poor management and impostor syndrome are both manifestations of self deception. For managers, self deception takes the form of not listening or not taking seriously to developer concerns, trusting their management's every word rather than using critical analysis in all interactions with their management, and generally "playing the Cover-Your-Ass game" rather than actually being their upper management's objective communication channel to developers and the objective voice for developers back such that both are functionally optimally in respect to the other.