More concretely, imagine you're on a team of 4 and management says the lowest performer by some metric will be cut at the end of the quarter and replaced with s

More concretely, imagine you're on a team of 4 and management says the lowest performer by some metric will be cut at the end of the quarter and replaced with some other random person. Does this sound like a healthy environment? It creates perverse incentives where folks become more concerned about outperforming the next person than actually working toward the primary goal of shipping a product. If your goal is to whittle a group of people down to one, then stacked ranking is the right tool. However most, if not all, organizations are created to achieve larger tasks. And this requires the cohesion of a team. If you think of only individuals, then you'll miss the forest for the trees.