Even an incompetent superior helps here, because at least in theory you can divert responsibility to them. It allows people do their work for the majority of the time when things don't go wrong. If they do go wrong, everyone gets to blame everyone else somehow, maybe the company tanks, but really life goes on.
You may point out problems here and there, but no other obvious alternative (like flat structures) are devoid of problems.
I'd be wary of solutions that take human responsibility completely out of the equation (such as AI). Sometimes a decision not made is actually for the best.
> If everyone's fully responsible for what they do, they don't do their work
Just to clarify, I think this means because they're busy rationalizing their decisions to invested stakeholders instead. Is that right?
In the general population, not everyone wants to be a leader, not by a long shot.
However, many people reject the idea of economic democracy, despite studies showing that e.g. worker cooperatives often have higher productivity and despite the fact that we accept democratic governance as a way to operate the government.
If people were actively rejecting worker co-ops, you'd expect to see them failing in practice. But what actually seems to happen is, they're very difficult to start up, but once running, run effectively with little centralized leadership.
This naturally leads to a situation where those working at the top are being overwhelmed with demands for their attention and decision making approval.
A conscientious person - arguably a good _leader_ - will take this responsibility seriously, and devote their time and energy to handle all those demands as best they can.
But another type of person - a "player" - will realise that the work of decision making actually _detracts_ from their success within the organisation. A "player" will figure out they should avoid the work of leadership as much as possible and instead devote their time to fostering their own image, gaining popularity, claiming responsibility for other peoples good decisions and generally working their way up the pyramid.
For me hierarchical power structures are the root cause of the problem here, not human nature - the "player" is really acting rationally, taking the path of least resistance to achieve their goals.
The problem IMO is we're using legacy approaches to organising ourselves groups that stems from military theory of the 18th century - that most armies themselves have now moved beyond - see https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-....
We need smarter ways to organise and we probably need AI at some level to help us scale up to higher volumes of effective decision making.