I almost never see this happen in real life. Maybe for a little while when a team first starts to establish hierarchies. But it always degrades, in my experience, until there exists an middle layer of management that only serves to slow down productivity. If you want to find out what's going wrong in any large corporate minded software studio, the managers will never give you the correct answer. Go ask the thought workers in the trenches as they typically understand why productivity drops off a cliff. When you have a brilliant visionary at the "broader, higher layer of abstraction" with the productive members of the team reporting directly, magic CAN happen. But largely, "managers" and similar roles are useless bloat. Same goes for the PM/producer type roles. I have a friend who started a game development studio a few years ago and committed to NEVER hiring a producer. It was bold. It's going really well and I think he's totally on to something. IMO, you can build better teams without those roles involved at all.