This happened about four years ago, and was worse than I am conveying in its additional details. I can't imagine this being encouraged, and I can imagine it being trained against, but the personality type/worldview seems too common to mitigate simply by discouraging it.
It seemed especially sociopathic in how the employee actively avoided understanding what they were told, and actively reframed it. I would have expected a more bureaucratic 'this is how we have do it for internal reasons' kind of reponse, rather than actively avoiding understanding. Similar to traditional complaints in the past about active Wikipedia / Stack Overflow types.