These patterns are ultimately detrimental to team/community building, however.
You see it in software as well: As a manager in calibration meetings, I have repeatedly seen how it is harder to convince a committee to promote/give a high rating to someone with a large pile of crucial but individually small projects delivered than someone with a single large project.
This is discouraging to people whose efforts seem to be unrewarded and creates bad incentives for people to hoard work and avoid sharing until one large impact, and it's disastrous when (as in most software teams) those people don't have significant autonomy over which projects they're assigned.
You see it in software as well: As a manager in calibration meetings, I have repeatedly seen how it is harder to convince a committee to promote/give a high rating to someone with a large pile of crucial but individually small projects delivered than someone with a single large project.
This is discouraging to people whose efforts seem to be unrewarded and creates bad incentives for people to hoard work and avoid sharing until one large impact, and it's disastrous when (as in most software teams) those people don't have significant autonomy over which projects they're assigned.