There are substantial duties outside of teaching and research. Tenure obligates faculty to some of these (eg- committee work) and frees them from others.
Additionally, many pillars are required to build stable colleges. A tenured faculty member has to have some measure of generalized aptitude and capability in addition to deep specialty and institutional knowledge. Many spend increasing time fighting their "other duties" and neglecting others as they approach retirement, placing burdens on their peers who have their own obligations or have taken on additional responsibilities in the college to juggle time for pay.
Good deans understand and attempt to manage this so they don't lose the faculty they would like to keep before an opportunity arises for the productive contributors to become tenured or tenure tracked. They stewards, past and present, who rely on information not available to the faculty at large.
Not being tenured doesn't necessarily mean you're poorly compensated or not highly valued, but it's a point of pride some can't swallow when they've given many years to an institution and have stalled in trajectory because their university couldn't justify adding a new line to their department. It's not about them, they know it, and the type of people who can't accept that, knowingly and incorrectly assign blame, and take everyone down with them like the author above are exactly who you want to protect the college from ever entering a tenured role.
I prefer three good researchers to a great one. The exchange rate is not even close.
Faculty, in general, don’t operate as a team like in a more traditional business. One or two or five might collaborate on a project but they typically operate very independently of one another.
Words like “collegiality” are frequently used in the academic hiring and promotion process to speak to issues that are seen as outside or parallel to merit. The problem being that the historical evidence shows that concerns about collegiality have frequently been used to disrupt actual evaluation of meritocracy in ways that specifically harm URM faculty.
Collegiality gets used because there is no real expectation that faculty act like a team, just that they aren’t active assholes to do heir peers in committee meetings.
Being difficult to work with is not a generalized negative in academia. It only is seen as a problem when someone has some other problem with you. Many faculty, in my experience/opinion, who are fantastic researchers have the emotional maturity of small children. There is a trend against that but it is far from disqualifying.
Academia, like many things, is a meritocracy until it’s not.