Those CEOs seem to have the opposite impression from what I've seen "on the ground": - Layoffs do a far better job of destroying morale and filling employees w

Those CEOs seem to have the opposite impression from what I've seen "on the ground": - Layoffs do a far better job of destroying morale and filling employees with fear for their own jobs than any sort of at-cause termination. Layoffs should also be filling shareholders with fear for the soundness of their investments, but apparently "profit line go up" is all that matters. - Not-tiny corporations are perfectly happy to terminate even adequate employees (let alone "underperforming but not a total disaster"). They have a much easier time replacing workers than smaller businesses do; their obstacles come less from an unwillingness to terminate and more from an aversion to risk - namely, risk of a wrongful termination claim, which they mitigate through formalities like performance reviews and PIPs. In short, by the time layoffs are on the table, a large company has likely already culled whatever it considers "dead weight". Businesses would also vastly prefer terminations to be for-cause rather than a formal layoff for the simple reason that firing someone typically makes it easier to wriggle out of being on the hook for unemployment than laying someone off.