That's cargo scrum, very common disease. Teams without autonomy or self-organization. The queue should consist of higher level tasks, milestones, and the team should rework them into the small tasks that will actually go into sprints. Of course there is a motivation to pick the higher priority tasks first, but team members should be able to pick a task with which they can most efficiently contribute to the sprint goal, it's not always the top one.
How common is that really?