The world is run by gigantic bureaucracies and owners of capital - who all value continuity and predictability above all else. Given that the world has historically been a madhouse of crazy, and most of us are doing materially better than before, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what would be wrong with these priorities. "May you live in interesting times" is a curse, and for a good reason.
Sadly, a specific vehicle of stability and predictability is disengaging most adults from the majority of their waking hours. After the maslovian needs of food, sex and shelter are fullfilled the average 9-5 desk job does not seem to provide in average fulfillment for the higher level needs.
One element of establishing stablity is organizing work in the large scale in industrial taylorian fashion where the labor input of the individual position is predictable. The easiest way to do this is to divide the work of the organization to small enough pieces so that individual work responsibilities are easy to communicate, transfer and, perhaps even more important, measure. Small, piecemeal duties are often felt as non-important since they are so simple to perform and thus not mentally fulfilling.
The three stages of engagement from best to worst are commitment, compliance, conflict - most employers are satisfied by compliance, and one of the easiest ways to statistically enforce compliance is through observing the work directly or through reports: thus we get the endless reporting. The reason this works even if no-one is reading the reports 24/7 is that most people are extremely uncomfortable with cognitive dissonance of doing one thing and saying the other, and usually align their actions with their reporting.
Thus we get the disengaged, prozac-crunching desk jokey of the early 21st century.
I think the best leaders recognize the critical difference between commitment and compliance for organizational output. Thus we get the start-ups "we want only passionate people here" spiel - they aim for organizational commitment from composing the organization from atomic committed individuals. But this does not work in the long run unless the organization culture as a whole is dedicated to maintaining commitment. There are various cultural tactics to achieve this. Most of them are about maintaining a team spirit and there are agressive and compassionate ways in which to achieve this. But since it's about culture and human condition I'm not sure if there are any text-book approaches to maximizing organizational commitment unless one engages in full-scale brain washing as employed by cults and historically by some states.
Since there is no ethically recognized textbook-standardizable sure-fire "commitment tactic" it is understandable to me most choose the "compliance tactic".
I don't believe these are necessarily conscious choices, but rather a product of cultural evolution of various industrial management memes.