Not exactly. If a large part of an employee’s compensation is in shares (which I assume is true for anyone sufficiently high on the org chart), and moreover the

Not exactly. If a large part of an employee’s compensation is in shares (which I assume is true for anyone sufficiently high on the org chart), and moreover the employee tends to sell the shares as soon as they are received, then dividends actually hurt the employee’s bottom line by reducing the share price, whereas buybacks help the employee’s bottom line for the same reason. This is what the author means when they say dividends help shareholders while buybacks help sharesellers.