&gt; any manager worth her salt should be able to cut 10% of her staff, so do it.<p>And that&#x27;s how every manager worth their salt learns to keep a bunch of dead weight around, so they will in due time be able to offer a victim to the dragon without a significant impact to her team.<p>That&#x27;s why these draconian methods end up enticing the very behaviors they are meant to prevent. You treat people like... not even animals, like inanimate objects, and they will start to behave like inanimate objects themselves with all the implications. That 3rd Law of Newton is such a lovely thing.