Seriously, how many IT and Finance so-called managers have only 1 or 2 people reporting to them? No other company looks like this. Look at the online org chart for yourself. Those organizations are engineered to create extra supervisor jobs to protect their favorite people.
This is one of the biggest problems at Conoco right now. Way, way too many managers who are that just in name, so they'd get the higher pay and protection. And of course, when layoffs occur, they are not targeted, even if a bunch of them are completely useless.