Just to be clear, I'm more or less playing devil's advocate here as an exercise for myself. There's simply not enough context in the story to be able to have a concrete opinion on it for me personally and creating hypotheticals like the one in my reply have been a great way for me to explore concepts more thoroughly so I can form a more nuanced opinion to apply in the real world when the need arises.

> I don't think it's more likely that this single action saved the company from insolvency than they were just impatient and selfish. I honestly don't really believe you do either.

Come on, that was obviously a made up scenario for the purposes of illustrating a point complete with a small nod to the TPS reports from Office Space movie.

The point was that, in my experience, the people in these environments that engage in this sort of act typically do so because they believe their individual situation justifies the action despite the effects it will have on someone else's ability to perform their function.

> Yes, that also immediately occurred to me. Being less selfish is good, but not being selfish at all is better.

That assumes that the selfish action is inherently "bad" or "negative" and that it's being done in a vacuum.

Sure, the worker taking the RAM is benefiting at the expense of the other workers time but you can imagine any number of scenarios where the benefit/cost of the act are greatly outweighed by the overall importance of the outcome that the act produced.