I've seen it happen when the company appeared to want someone to turn around a sinking ship (project) (or go down with the ship and assume responsibility.) This was for a big project at a big publicly traded company. They gave someone a promotion and an ultra-reach assignment (literally, an assignment so reach that it was effectively unreachable in retrospect.)

The person failed the assignment and went down with the ship. It wasn't a terrible deal because he got a huge layoff payout.