In my personal opinion, you get a healthier culture if you either 1) have managers and let them manage or 2) admit that you require them to be individual contributors and restrict their "managing" purely to part time HR initiatives and not to actual additive management (something more like extra-curricular mentoring and not talent management, career and skills development).
I should caveat that I've had good managers, bad managers and completely mediocre managers. So I do believe that, although rare, it can be done well and it can provide value to individual contributors' careers and to the company's value. I just don't assume it's automatically the right approach at every company.
Lots of parents spend their days blaming other people for their lot in life, and taking no responsibility themselves. They do this loudly to each other while the kids are there.
Little kids have big ears and learn by imitating.
Once the pattern is set, it's like kiln-fired concrete. When that kid makes it into management - everything good that happens is their doing, everything bad is somebody else's fault. It's unlikely that person will ever change unless they have some sort of epiphany.
Personally I hold myself responsible for all outcomes assigned to me. In the cases where it could be plausibly not be my fault, I still allocate blame for not having foresight to avoid the situation. This is my hack to prevent development of a blame reflex, and to enforce learning from every poor outcome.
If you only judge by the team shipping on time or hitting their number, then a dictator/slave driver looks pretty good early on.
If you judge by employee morale, someone that misses numbers but doesn't overstress their team can look good.
Unfortunately, things like employee churn are lagging indicators, so if a manager wants to look good, the temptation will always be there to take credit for themselves out of self-preservation, even if it's all in their head that they're in any danger of losing their job.
