I think we need to ignore the employee who games the system when setting up this relationship though, and focus on the good kind of selfish, not the bad kind. Y

I think we need to ignore the employee who games the system when setting up this relationship though, and focus on the good kind of selfish, not the bad kind. You can't build a system with the latter and have a lower-level problem to solve in that scenario. My experience as an engineering managher is these individuals are the exception.