Depending on the company, it can also be a symptom of excess management layers. If your grand-manager tells your manager "ok, today your job is to cut $X from

Depending on the company, it can also be a symptom of excess management layers. If your grand-manager tells your manager "ok, today your job is to cut $X from this team's budget", then she'd better do that. She might know full well you have the time and capacity to do it yourself, but if she passed it down the chain someone might notice she wasn't doing anything. Which, obviously, is equally dysfunctional. But it can explain why someone who isn't generally a micro-manager is churning up extra work.