The key element is motivation. Good managers are about getting the job done.
Bad managers are all about abusing the people under them to make themselves feel more important.
These are not compatible goals.
One of the tragedies of MBA culture is that it teaches businesses to screw over employees, customers, and often shareholders too.
There's no sense of making a contribution - it's all about being the criminal with the knife, taking on people who can't defend themselves or don't even understand they're being mugged.
Bad managers are all about abusing the people under them to make themselves feel more important.
I agree but it's not that simple. Most bad managers (the garden variety bad ones, not the psychopaths) aren't trying to abuse the people under them, but are trying to make themselves look good at any cost.
They often look like they're making "hard choices" (i.e. choices against the interests of others in the organization, including their reports) in the interest of "getting the job done" but they're actually externalizing costs or pushing problems into the future.
I would say that good managers try to direct action toward the shared interests of the employees and the organization. Good management tries to prevent those kinds of conflicts, long before they've become obvious, because when the organization and employee play against each other, it starts getting bad for everyone. As you correctly mentioned, MBA culture is all about squeezing pennies out of every transaction, which endangers any hope of good will in the business.
I agree that most managers, even if they are bad, would not abuse people under them just because it feels gratifying. That kind of behavior would be a really strong indicator of a serious mental problem. Most of the time the abuse pattern would be more about neglect or a failure of empathy. The abuse might be in plain sight and look calculated to inflict pain, but the manager would either be oblivious or practicing denial. Their attention would be on some other priority, like pleasing their own superior.
Bad managers are all about abusing the people under them to make themselves feel more important.
These are not compatible goals.
One of the tragedies of MBA culture is that it teaches businesses to screw over employees, customers, and often shareholders too.
There's no sense of making a contribution - it's all about being the criminal with the knife, taking on people who can't defend themselves or don't even understand they're being mugged.