There's a great book about this called Seeing Like a State. It's about the conflict between top-down planning and bottom-up development of complex systems - things like cities and forests.
One of the big points is that leaders tend to be obsessed with making the system legible to themselves, often at great cost to the effectiveness of the system itself. There's a sense that "if I can't easily model/perceive it in my head, it doesn't exist or it's worthless". Of course the reality is that the majority of what goes on in a complex system is invisible to any outsider; the system is more complex than the brain trying to model it. So management efforts that ignore or even try to reduce that illegible complexity end up destroying much of the system they're attempting to manage.
I think there's also a simpler explanation: It's unintentional gamification. People like dopamine hits they get from rising numbers, rectilinear grids, clean charts and projections. So they pursue these things as an end goal, imagining somehow that this is the same as pursuing success. Of course a really well-working complex system (like a company or city or forest) is too complex to model with such tools. But the manager isn't playing to make a good complex system, he's playing a little game of graphs on his computer screen. The chart went up and to the right - you win today!
But why am I supposed to feel good about being part of that system? And who decided that was the best we could possibly do?
19 years out from the release of Black On Both Sides and still all anyone wants is to tell me to try to have some fret in my heart behind the things that they do. I mean, I guess...
This is the best summary of what matches my experience in this industry that I've seen. Favouriting.
Based on what I read about it, I agree that the way "employee engagement" is pursued is missing the point. Especially that companies typically also optimize for having employees be replaceable cogs. I don't think you can have both. Engagement comes from aligned goals, autonomy, and coworkers you can relate with. Which is opposite of what you want to have when you're building a machine, where employees are dumb parts.