This reminds me a lot of a book I read a while ago called "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt. It focuses on the sociological aspects of hiring practices & performance evaluation measures in the knowledge economy. It's a rather obscure book but I found it fascinating.

Basically, one of the central conclusions is that many of the metrics by which knowledge workers are evaluated are really less about measuring actual technical competence or domain knowledge and much more about detecting the propensity for conformity and obedience.

Maybe that's not too surprising for some, but what's even more interesting is that this can often be the case without the evaluators/managers/people in power even being aware of it. In many cases they genuinely believe they are evaluating for domain mastery / technical skill, but are fooled by the hidden signal that correlates to what they see as "desirable" outcomes.