What if being a bit of a jerk is a requirement to make progress in some environments?

When everyone is blockading everyone else, and becomes comfortable in that artificial ground-state, it takes some energy input to push things over into an actual better state. It won't happen on its own. People need to take ownership of decisions in order to make real change, but in a comfortable mutual blockade everyone seeks to avoid ownership so they don't get left holding the bag, so to speak.

The difference between someone who is an effective maverick (even on a small scale where the term would be a joke) and someone who is just a jerk comes down to attitude and approach. There's always a positive, inclusive, hey-at-least-I-offered sort of approach, and a negative, exclusive, my-way-or-the-highway approach.

I worked in academic IT for a while ages ago and the mutual blockade was the standard approach. Nothing got done, nothing got better, and it was always someone else's fault. Get individuals one-on-one and you'd always get a very rational sounding explanation of the situation and how they're hamstrung, get people together and you'd always get denial, and truly nobody wanted to unravel the Gordian knot, because it was a comfortable and familiar evil.

I happened to find myself lead on a project with a lot of autonomy, and also seconded to another project where I was a mere serf at the same time.

On the former, which was to roll out commodity desktop management stuff to a very fractured base of IT (each faculty had its own staff and a fair bit of infra, tiny little datacenters, etc), I took a very open-source, 'bazaar' style approach; produced a free, federated, sane-defaults, customizable system that was not overly prescriptive, and introduced it to those faculties one by one until 90% of the university was happily running it and working together better than before. This did require that I run afoul of people who were comfortable with the status quo, at least until I could eventually bring them around; but because I maintained a default open position the entire time, essentially being very modest and classy about the fact that my system was going to take over everything else, I won people over. A lot of the time, they're really just casting about looking for leadership, which is better defined as 'an individual willing to take risks and own consequences'.

On the latter, which was an ITIL project, the project manager had the exact opposite approach. Big expensive proprietary system, nothing federated or optional, his way or get lost. He made enemies at every turn, because instead of bringing them clarity and capability, he instead tried to use power and control to make people do what he wanted, without any real concession to it providing commensurate value for them. He ruled his own team like a tyrant, shutting down any ideas I had, expecting me to work against a requirements doc and not question anything.

Only through my own skunkworks approach and through using political capital I had accumulated on the other project was able to bring anyone onboard in anything more than a mandated sense; but the project ultimately failed because people did not want to let a jerk win, and in the case of academia where they're hard to fire, they felt comfortable resisting.

The moral here is that there's definitely a role for someone pushing large effective change, change that people may resist - in fact, it's critical - but you have to do it in a way that offers a continual and permanent olive branch to everyone, always giving them a chance to join in, never rubbing their face in anything, never holding vendettas or grudges. This is a hard thing for many humans to accomplish.