It is very much contextual. At my current job, if my manager hands me the toy ninja, I would happily try to take pictures with it. Because my manager is very m

It is very much contextual. At my current job, if my manager hands me the toy ninja, I would happily try to take pictures with it. Because my manager is very much knee-deep in the trenches with the rest of the devs, designers, and QA folk day in day out. He has, without fail, and repeatedly, shown that he understands the situation "on the ground" and has always treated our concerns with the respect and gravity demanded. At Amazon there was not a chance - my manager was the guy barking orders from up high, funneling the whims of even higher management down with little to no filtering or defense for our ability to get it done. He was a straight pass-through, and it sucked. Him handing me the ninja would have been a damned insult (and it was). The question is not job titles, it's entirely about the working relationship, and this is also why "inventing culture" fails. When you have an incredibly segmented workforce, where management is entirely separated from the grunts, and neither side have any respect for the other, any such "culture" is naturally a decree enforced from the top, rather than a genuine expression of what employees already feel.