What is wrong with South African corporates?

A friend of mine recently had an anxiety attack due to extreme stress levels. Someone else that we both know who is working at the same company is super stressed. My friend's predecessor died from a heart attack at work due to stress.

A lot of this comes from managers having huge expectations and pushing people to do even more urgent work and then still complaining when there are delays. What does not help is other people and departments delegating work just because they do not want to or learn. My friend was angry because of the sales people not supporting their customers when they have questions about the products that they sold and pushing that onto support. Notably support should be dealing with things like errors and not general questions.

To make matters worse, there are a lot of queries coming in that get delegated to support that should never get there. Also people not reading properly does not help. What is even worse is that the company website does not get fixed up properly to streamline this process and to reduce the huge workload and stress on the people at the bottom. None of the managers wants to take responsibility to do this since that means less support queries answered and they have to admit that there is a problem which stops their promotion and bonuses. Obviously getting more support staff is not an option because that means paying more salaries, wasting time in training people and less bonuses.

My friend is now seriously concerned about his health due to this anxiety attack. Several people from other companies that I was talking to were talking about similar issues. The common pattern is that management is disruptive and just makes matters worse and does not really manage the situation since managers do not really want to know about problems or the details. If something then goes wrong, the people below the managers involved get blamed and written warnings and most likely even more work, but the cause of the problem never gets addressed.

In the end there is high staff turnover and wasted time on training and no real progress made to solving the cause of the high staff turnover and related losses with that. People seem to love blaming others and not wanting to take responsibility themselves, but they want "responsible" positions like being a manager for the status and salary. This is notably not applicable to all companies here, but it seems to be a rather common trend from what I have heard and seen.