It applies at the team level as well. Those team players you know probably sing the victories of the team just a little more loudly than they televise their own failures.

It isn’t really that Machiavellian. At any operational level, humans and human organizations give more attention to their own successes than failures.

I initially came across it in somebody's review of The Red Queen but idk who. The book isn't exactly a must-read, though.

I was skeptical at first but I keep seeing the behaviour around me.

Taking credit for unearned wins while sloughing off deserved blame isn't general to hominids; the name for that pathology is narcissism. I'm not saying you're wrong to diagnose certain persons or organizations with that, but "cynical" is right.

You misunderstand. I'm not talking about manufacturing unearned credit or totally eliminating earned blame, I'm talking about distorting existing, deserved credit/blame to be moderately larger/smaller.

So, some organizations or individuals have a tendency to do this, and the tendency can be measured on a spectrum. There's an opposing spectrum that you're excluding, right? The people who take blame for things they rightly don't have to take blame for, who clean up messes that aren't their responsibility, and who shun credit. There are those people, and (we) keep the world running.

Claiming that the psychology you're projecting is universal is cynical because it excludes those people, or worse attempts to paint their efforts as merely meta-narcissistic victimhood, when lots of people actually just try to correct problems and get shit done.

I can't say that I've ever worked with anyone like that but my experience can't be universal.

I've never worked for a company with fewer than 200 employees, so maybe there's a correlation there.

I've never worked for a company with more than 30 employees or so, or on a team larger than 4... so it may be that the self-effacing people I'm describing tend to show up in smaller organizations. Or it may be that small teams bring out a side of people that's more willing to share the glory and shoulder the blame.

I've certainly worked with the type of people you're describing, but they stand out like a sore thumb in a smaller work environment. Their ego becomes a subject of contempt.

And also, just on a human level, there are many of us who don't aspire to glory. It might be as simple as having an internal sense of pride in knowing you did a job well, even if no one will ever know that you were the one who did it. I have a lot of friends who fit that description, who simply enjoy tinkering and building things and want little to do with the rest of the world. They make great employees for companies, but they're often overlooked because they don't promote themselves.