Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Beria was a good manager, they wouldn't have to threaten to shoot people. Or, another approach is that managers who threaten their employees' lives are awful at their jobs. In the free world, managers don't threaten that and they achieve far more. Even in the military, whatever the law, even in wartime it's never done afaik.
Beria was, without a doubt, a cruel maniac. Chertok in his books - https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta... , but the episod is, I think, from volume IV - tells the following story. Soviet space designers are in the beginning of the work on the manned Moon expedition. Korolev and Glushko - two towering figures, the best rocket constructor and best engine constructor of the country - can't find…
In addition, any bad manager can scream at and threaten people about some individual issue, but there is a lot of evidence that it's very counterproductive overall. What people learn to do is to avoid the danger, not to get anything done - including taking no initiative or responsibility, or even accomplishing something that might attract attention.
Nobody models themselves on Soviet management; it's almost the epitome of bad management, the picture in the dictionary. The Soviet space program performed poorly compared with the US.