It is much easier to think "we should fire that person" instead of "how can we improve this person."
When you fire someone. You tax HR and yourself with the process both of letting someone go and finding their replacement. You have to pay their salary 3-6 months going forward as well as all the paid vacation they may have saved up. Most importantly you tax your team with the added resource drain of covering the tasks as well as integrating the replacement. You also risk damaging morale, and worse, you risk increasing employee anxiety as even the best employee can have inferiority issues.
That being said, the basic mantra in management should always be that you can get rid of anyone, it’s just a matter of cost. So if you need to fire someone, then you need to fire someone.
Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves, but, that’s a style or management that isn’t present in a lot of companies because it takes a corporate culture that is very hard to maintain in large organisations and require quite a lot of management talent in small organisations. It’s also something that is incredibly hard to do as a single manager if the culture is against you.
Well, that’s time (or deferred pay) they’ve contractually and morally earned, so that part’s entirely fair.
In the U.S - where you generally don't have to pay as long a severance pay if at all.
on edit: as in most things 'in the U.S' this varies on state by state basis.
Does Denmark not have constructive dismissal laws? Making changes that force someone out is an easily winnable unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal, at least for the UK. And that costs more than just firing them for bad performance.
You clearly haven't met Austrian management. It's nearly at will employment (in theory it's not, but in some domains many companies know and do skirt around the law to get rid of employees quickly without getting sued).
Once the management decides they don't like you anymore, you're given your standard one to three months notice, then you're gone. I asked a lawyer, and they said the employer can fire your without any reason as long as they give you your contractual notice period.
My favorite example is them using Jira velocity charts to fire the one with the slowest curve. You get a warning (p.i.p.) telling you your velocity needs to catch up, then after two sprints you get your notice handed to you.
OTOH, there are other EU countries where firing people is really difficult. Here it's just a rubber stamp thanks to decades of pro-business politicians elected in power who eroded workers' rghts.
In many English-speaking countries is not difficult to convince an employee to quit.
If someone really should be fired but isn't, that also damages morale.
This is the crux of the issue: The definition of "causing problems for other people" isn't as well defined as it may seem.
Someone who is constantly driving the team further apart than together, struggling to work with other members of the team, and being openly dismissive of others would fit the definition of "causing problems for other people".
From another perspective, it would also fit the definition of the "hard to work with" person in this article. That's the point: Even when someone is falling behind, as an employee you must find a way to at least try to work with them and lead by example.
One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time.
The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person.
Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.
If you're too busy thinking what an amazing worker you are and everyone else is dragging you down, there's a good chance you feel vindicated in behaving in a way that makes your coworkers' jobs harder. Why should you help them out? They're not even trying to do things right and they're making you look bad.