Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems. Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easil

Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems. Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects: Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers. Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy. Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.