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teageegeepea comments on The fallacy of work-life compartmentalization - Less Wrong
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I think a lot of the 'irrational' workplace behaviour you describe can also be seen as a rational response to bad incentives on the part of employees. It is relatively rare for jobs to consistently reward employees for performance that contributes directly to company profits so much employee behaviour is instead a response to what is actually rewarded by a perverse incentive structure.
One of the reasons small companies and startups can be successful despite lacking the resources or economies of scale of larger companies is that large companies have great difficulty maintaining a structure that rewards employees for productive activity.
Tim Harford gave an argument like that in "The Logic of Life". It's not that he had data backing that up, the book is heavily based on economic theory & reasoning.
Yeah, I've read the book. Having worked in large companies where a lot of unproductive activity went on it always seemed fairly clear to me that people were generally responding rationally to the incentives that existed when they took actions that didn't maximize shareholder profits. I work at a startup now where the incentives are rather different.