That's literally a manager's job. If you don't have managers, by definition, you have individual contractors. The point of being a manager is to line up the work of all the ICs so they are more or less pointing in the same direction and can tackle problems that no one person could handle on their own.

There is always a productivity cost to this, and it takes many forms. One is simply the manager's salary: they aren't doing useful IC work, they're spending all their time aligning their reports' work with the goals of the organization.
Another is that the ICs will typically be working on projects that align with their organization's goals rather than their own goals, and most people are less excited by a faceless megacorp's goals than their own personal projects. A third is that all the communication overhead and status reports come out of time that could be spend actually working. A fourth is that you're often forced to adapt less productive methods, programming languages, frameworks, etc. simply so that what you're doing can be communicated with other employees.

But this is all intentional, and savvy businesses know it's going on. It's the cost of being a big business, and you usually can't become a big business unless you can solve problems that smaller businesses cannot.

A corollary is that a good manager usually doesn't care much about how productive you are, only that you have positive productivity and demand little of their time & energy. If they manage a team of 10, your productivity could be 1/10th theirs at the same task, and yet be a net win for them (and the organization), because the team's output is more than they could achieve on their own. However, if your productivity is half theirs and you take up half of their time with your questions, it's easier for them to just do your job, and now you're a performance problem. And conversely, if your productivity is double theirs but you're a jerk that demotivates the other 9 employees, they're better off letting you go even though you're a superstar, because their team productivity is 1/5 what it would with the other 10 people on it.

This is why there's often a lot of counterintuitive behavior in large organizations. Your manager knows that you're reading HN on company time, or taking personal calls, or arranging doctors appointments. They don't care; you'll make it up later, and it's usually a net productivity gain to make sure employees are rested, happy, and healthy rather than squeak out every working hour from them. Same if you want to take off an hour early for childcare. But conversely, if you're putting in long hours and cranking out tons of code but you're a jerk that makes the rest of the team stressed and anxious whenever they come into work, you are a net productivity sink and will probably get let go. It's even worse if you're putting the company at risk through HR violations, negative PR, stealing trade secrets, etc - which is why even prominent high-performers can get fired for that.

The bigger the company the higher the downside, and hence the greater the tendency toward mediocrity. In a startup your bad attitude, loose mouth, or penchant for lechery might be tolerated because the potential upside outweighs the risk to a company that's probably going to fail anyway. In a megacorp there are 200,000 other employees that can do your job, so a.) your productivity has to be pretty bad before you're a net negative to the organization and b.) your potential negative productivity caps out at 200,000x your salary, which means it doesn't take much of an infraction against the company before you're terminated.