It's pretty reflective of the environment these employees operate in, though.
I'm an engineering manager at $BigCo. In my past life, I was a startup founder, so I'm no stranger to doing more with less. As a startup founder, the way I achieved efficiencies was a.) work on the right problems, or as close to the right problems as you can with the information available to you b.) don't do unnecessary work c.) look for efficiencies where the same piece of work can achieve multiple aims and d.) cut communication costs & overhead whenever possible.
At $BigCo, I generally have a set amount of work that my team has to deliver. I can provide input on priorities & goals, but if I, say, redirect product strategy into an approach that gets more users or offers a better user experience, the PM gets the credit, not me. (If they didn't, it's doubtful they would let me.). If I started a brand-new product that's beloved by users, it'll get killed by some executive that's threatened by its success. If I say "Let's not do X, it's not very important", and X is something that's been asked of my team by either execs or another team, I'm branded as uncooperative and will probably be managed out. Same if I cut communication loops and just do things without letting people know. OTOH, if I do lots of unnecessary work that is asked for by other people, and gussy it up so it seems more difficult than it actually is, all of my people get promoted and I look like a rising superstar.
I think this is the organizational variant of Gall's Law. ["A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."]. Once a company has evolved processes and structure and an org chart, it cannot be made more efficient, because the inefficiency is coded into the structure of the organization. You have to throw away the company and start with a new, simpler company that does the same thing.