Few people are openly malicious. That doesn't mean they are altruistic or motivated by some concept of "greater good". Most people will go along with the general sentiment though their actions are typically focused on their own benefit. This makes a lot of sense.

Honestly, your perspective feels a little out of touch. If you had some private conversations with individual contributors at multiple levels of your organization, you may get a different perspective. In my experience, most "leadership" is about maximizing the leader's personal gain. They are running their own company within the company and will compete in whatever internal currency the company culture has. This is why incentives are difficult.

Perhaps the simplest way to manage is to a P/L and employee retention. So long as those are healthy, the group is healthy.

The meta recently has been to ignore everything and only focus on maximizing the stock price, which is aligned with their incentives (stock based compensation, bonus based on stock performance) and the modern investors (money quick now).

I wonder if the rotten feeling I have on management is linked to western societies moving from high trust to low trust and from patient to impatient.