Like an evolutionary process, companies are only ever graded on the sum of their policies. There is almost never a company that offers almost everything the same but no stack ranking; it would not surprise me to see that the market for labor is “inefficient” here.
I wonder if there are management studies on introducing stack ranking to a unit inside of a company?
If there are, they are not framed in societal terms but in Darwinist terms.
In regular society, it's more profitable to be a criminal/mugger/what have you, viewed entirely in a practical sense. It only becomes unprofitable when (a) there's law to prevent you and (b) there's a general idea that preventing you from doing that is correct in some way.
If anybody's experimented with this, and I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon had as it seems like they'd try anything to see if it worked, I would guess that at scale stack ranking produces slightly more efficiency and productivity than it costs in harm to the well-being of workers. Since Amazon doesn't care at all about the well-being of workers OR employers… they're like a sort of pyre to the cause of scale and profitability… then stack ranking would stay.
If it didn't return some arbitrarily small (or large, as far as we know) benefit to the company at the cost of the well-being of the workers, it would be gone. Somebody's got to have measured this by now, and all these tech unicorns are smart enough to ditch it if it was actually impinging on their productivity. It's not, it's impinging on worker conditions, so win/win as far as the tech giants are concerned.
I wonder if there are management studies on introducing stack ranking to a unit inside of a company?