You say this is an American thing. Is there a country you are thinking of that has this less engrained? My experience working with foreign cultures is often that organizations are more hierarchical, not less.
Probably it's all very hierarchical but it definitely differs in level and degree between cultures.
Anecdotal examples:
- Brazil (~10 years experience): very, very hierarchical, your manager/boss is up on the totem pole, societal status, etc. In non-tech environments you can expect to be berated, chastised, and generally abused as an underling. There are good bosses, of course, but using a dumb generalisation the culture is "I'm better than you because I'm higher in the hierarchy". In the end underlings will be bad mouthing the boss at any opportunity behind the boss's back but will pay lip service in front of them, politically-heavy work environments.
- USA (limited experience ~1-2 years), very hierarchical, politically-heavy, bosses can demand stuff from you and it's expected to bow down to their whims.
- Sweden (~10 years experience): not so hierarchical, consensus-based approach for decisions, a manager is a different position (more laterally viewed than upwards), challenging bosses decisions/opinions in a respectful way is encouraged, someone higher in the hierarchy forcing underlings to their will is very badly viewed (and usually a "failure of leadership" because you couldn't convince people on your vision).
In my observation, USA is a lot more like your description of Sweden. I think this came with the popularity of servant leadership[1]. Even the military (in some branches?) is aiming for sharing goals instead of orders and promoting self-organizing teams because hierarchies don’t scale. At least according to books like It’s Your Ship and Extreme Ownership.
The realization in management science of the past ~20 years has been that people only do things when they understand the goal and agree with the plan. They also need leeway to change the plan if it isn’t working.
> Even the military (in some branches?) is aiming for sharing goals instead of orders and promoting self-organizing teams because hierarchies don’t scale.
This is incorrect. We consolidate most of our decision making at the small team leader level. Title and role, because of that, are explicitly not intwined. Lance Corporals can lead Sergeants if they possess the experience to do so. This is more common in the infantry. Small team leader have always practiced servant leadership; the idea that you eat last, take first watch, are the first in and last out on patrols is as old as time herself.
My outsider perspective is that the military trains its members in leadership skills[1] at practically every level, because modern great-power approaches to warfare rely on heavy devolution of decision-making and leadership such that leadership is a regular component of the job at all but (perhaps) the very lowest ranks, and because almost anyone might end up needing to act as a leader, situationally, even if they ordinarily don't do much of that.
(though, of course, an order's still an order—but, even there, their training in proper order-crafting focuses heavily on not making orders any more restrictive than necessary, so those receiving them have as much flexibility as possible to achieve the objective as they see fit—what you want, not how to do it, that kind of thing)
[1] Hey, look, training people, what a crazy idea, eh, corporate America? And not just with snake-oil bullshit seminars or online "courses" (videos with quizzes anyone with two functioning brain cells could have aced without watching the videos) or other box-checking crap that passes for training in the corporate world—actual training.
