I agree that firing assholes improves a company's morale and environment, but sadly there is little evidence that it actually help a company's business.
Again this is mostly anecdotal, from what I've seen teams do when the Resident Jerk was fired or left. I've never in my 20 years as a professional software developer seen a single person leave a team and then see the team immediately fall to pieces because that person really was the critical lynchpin that people thought. I've seen lots of people stick around far, far too long because folks (management usually) were WORRIED that's what was going to happen, but it never actually seems to.
Eventually the person got managed out (not fired, just isolated from the teams) and upper management thought the team would just eventually thrive after some short loss of productivity, but that never happened: the poor performers were put in front of the customer who commissioned the project (role that was usually handled by the jerk, who was highly competent at that due to their technical brilliance and assertive personality even with the customer), and after a few round trips the customer smelled the incompetency and literally said “we’re going to quit this project, we feel like there’s no technical direction lately”. Massive loss for the company, in the 7 figures. It almost caused the company to fail due to that being the largest customer at that phase.
In those cases, the jerk did an amazing job at keeping a very productive technical communication with the customer, and keep the high performers on track towards what really needed to be done in those projects.
Isn't it a matter of management though? Assholes can be productive to a company if you have a good manager doing damage control and sinking time into firewalling the asshole.
Given the prevalence of this disease and the abundance of managers, it seems like a good way to increase the hiring pool of a company.
As a manager, you want to contain an asshole just enough so that coworkers do not leave, also enough so that the asshole feels they have to make up for their social behavior with additional skill and hard work (which is not hard, they are often competitive).
I believe (and that's the reason why I don't want to employ people) that the optimal point for a business is when you maintain your employees on the edge of quitting. Assholes create stress and competition, an environment where projects often strive and individuals wither.
All the ethical managers or business starters I have known have been replaced by more assholish versions. This could be anecdotal evidence of course, but I think that assholes are better suited for a corporate world of greed and competition.
However, I think it is way too simple to be useful. People who are happy and relatively less stressed are way more productive on average. (Yerkes - Dodson Law applies here)
Con: none for the company
The reason I say this is that most companies that we consider "successful" are in my experience mostly being assholes to their customers. Since a company doesn't have an independent personality of its own, I imagine that such behavior must come from the people at the top of the food chain at those places, or at least the people very high in that chain.
Maybe the root issue lies with our societies putting business above ethics. "As long as you're making money, everything's fine, until you piss off someone with more money than you."