It happens all the time. At a large corporate place I was working frontend at, our dpmt manager spent almost no time with the teams and all time concerned with outout metrics. When his boss looked to be retiring and the prospect came up to get his job, he started a new year by—seemingly with no knowledge of how things were working—by shuffling all the teams based on how he thought people should be organized. He then kicked off two or three major tight deadline high budget projects with those new teams, and proceeded to take a vacation. Needless to say there was a lot of turnover, I got terminated, projects failed, and he got his promotion somehow.