That's orthogonal to the point. There are also teams with no "refractory employees", no morale problems, and no performance problems. But according to this pie

That's orthogonal to the point. There are also teams with no "refractory employees", no morale problems, and no performance problems. But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway. It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it. It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political. Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons. A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.