Probably the archive you installed had already been compiled on the same OS release and architecture.
Usually, configure generates the Makefiles that indicate what options you want and where you want it. make generally compiles the source code into binary files specific to the architecture it's run on, which is why in most cases the make is necessary. make install just moves the newly compiled software into the location that configure told it to. If someone else already ran the necessary commands and then just compressed everything that was installed, then you wouldn't need to run anything.
In fact, that's how software packaging works. I noticed you mentioned you installed on a RHEL platform; RPM packages are simply CPIO archives with additional metadata. According to a .spec file, rpmbuild extracts the source code, runs configure to tell the Makefiles to install to an alternate build root directory, builds the end product with make, and installs it into the alternate build root directory with make install. Then the .spec indicates which files are to be included in the final package and cleans itself up.
About GNU configuration standards, make, and autoconf
About RPMs:
Maximum RPM and How to Create an RPM
