system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can you tell me the name of the following principal: Inefficiency of workers benefits managers whose status and compensation is linked proportionally to the number of subordinate who report to them?

It is named after a ~~Nobel prize winning~~ economist active in the 1950s iirc. I want to look it up but have not been able to find anything about it without the name. This person suggested (seriously or sardonically—I‘m not sure which) that in an organization in which managers are compensated and have status in part based on the size of the staff that reports to them they will have a self-interest in creating inefficiency among those workers in order to rationalize additional hires that result in additional compensation and/or status for themselves. Who wrote this and does it actually reflect any sort of reality in real world organizations? Thank you.

Edit: Does not seem to match-up with any Nobel winners.
gpt
I think this sounds like what you would describe as empire building, or siloing of an organisation. 

More broadly this is an example of an agent principle problem, where an individual has different goals than their employer. A common example of this is ceos who get bonuses in the form of stock options, they therefore want to raise the stock price as much as possible and may do things that short term raise the stock price, but long term hurt the company. 

There are a lot of examples of this, probably the most famous one would be Enron, but it’s pretty common.