Depending on your manager, it's intentional. For managers, personal power is a result of having more people below you on the organization tree. The most logical way to respond to this incentive is to hire more people below you. And if people are working slowly, then it's a justification to hire more people.
Not all managers do this, but the incentive exists, and managers who do it tend to gain power faster than those who don't.
So, because incentives are misaligned, evolutionary pressure exists in corporations to make you, as an individual contributor, inefficient.