I think in most cases it is the proverbial tail wagging the dog. The established fantasy to use your terms is what leads to the behavior and productivity is the

I think in most cases it is the proverbial tail wagging the dog. The established fantasy to use your terms is what leads to the behavior and productivity is the rationalization. Giving up on "hard work" feels to managenent and their bosses like leaving money on the table. Even if they would consistently get five times better results and no downsides by having say game programmers work eight hour days and spend half of the day having LAN parties in the game so they became intimately familiar with its mechanics, performance, bugs, and flaws it would emotionally feel morally wrong "slacking" because it contradicts their values - in spite of the purpose of the values. Inertia tends to keep things the status quo until "feedback" forces changes on it. Confusingly the status quo itself may not be stable - rewriting the code base every three years in a new language regardless of how well it works is just as much a status quo as leaving it in untouched COBOL and only putting efforts into compatability layers when absolutely needed.