It’s one of those misaligned incentive issues.
Companies often (but not always) want someone to just do ‘It’ with minimal extra management effort.
This is because every companies success is generally gated by the available extra intelligence and decision making ability at every level (really every organization). The more management work put in, and the more ongoing thinking required to produce unit X (whatever it is for the company), the less competitive they are.
Most companies of course aren’t great at this, but as long as their competitors aren’t much better (and/or other factors add more ‘competitiveness’), it still works out.
Most dumb and value destroying things happening anywhere is because someone who is in the position to make a decision doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to make a good decision, or someone with the bandwidth to make that decision isn’t trusted to do so because of lack of consistent mental bandwidth by someone else to supervise, select, or police folks like them.
For individuals, like you note, the incentives are often the opposite - to grow, take on individual risk, etc.
And most individuals who are not actually entrusted with the scope and scale that would challenge them HAVE extra mental capacity (albeit perhaps not the experience or whatever to actually be successful, but they won’t know that) because they aren’t subjected to those loads generally.
Not to discount nepotism (usually caused by trust issues/difficulty with owners managing non family members), corruption (usually caused by those in control not seeing how to produce value while following the rules), etc.