Already back in the glory days of the demo scene, the best teams came from Sweden, with the other Scandinavian countries also well represented.
It is definitely both a culture and a climate thing. The point about consensus culture is a good observation - in some contexts it can be crippling, but in creative-technical hybrid endeavors like games, these teams can really do some damage.
The demo scene was indeed strong in Sweden. Several of the Swedish game developers started out there. Digitial Illusions (the DI in DICE) started out as the demo group The Silents and wrote pinball games for the Amiga. Several members from TBL (the Black Lotus) later came to work in the games industry.
Trivia: Stefan Boberg who is a technical director on Frostbite wrote the Amiga version of LHA which was the file compressor on Amiga.
Tore Blystad (game director on Hitman: Absolution) was also from the demoscene, part of the Norwegian demo group Spaceballs in the early 1990s, where he worked on this famous demo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_Art_(demo)
Oddly there's not a big game scene in Norway, though. The Norwegian demosceners seem to have either gone into other things, or gone into games outside of Norway.
I'd love to hear more about the decision making with a consensus culture. I'm very much a consensus-style manager, but occasionally I am overridden from the top and I feel like it bums my team out.
Are there cases or profiles of people talking about it?
It is definitely both a culture and a climate thing. The point about consensus culture is a good observation - in some contexts it can be crippling, but in creative-technical hybrid endeavors like games, these teams can really do some damage.