Explicit stack-ranking is the myopic version of this - I'm more talking about the pretty standard "if you distinguish yourself at work you can get a promotion w

Explicit stack-ranking is the myopic version of this - I'm more talking about the pretty standard "if you distinguish yourself at work you can get a promotion with an associated pay increase" that goes on at pretty much every company. It's not called a rank ordering, but there's only so much room for employees to distinguish themselves, so in practice it's roughly the same for those above the cutoff.