One thing is that the A's are watching how you treat the C's. They might not have a good gauge of the culture from their own experience because they take care of themselves.
They should be getting praise and more mentoring, not sure why they'd worry about how the C's are being treated. It should also be clear to the C's that they are not making the cut and either they get better or they leave.
There's something that is very pernicious in the government in Brazil (where I'm from) where in a department there's one person that does all the work while everyone else sits around. You can't fire the non-performing ones or push them because there is a very strong worker protection system for them. Back in college it took me a full week to get my grade history because the person that did all the work was on vacation and nobody else bothered to learn how to pull it or cared if students couldn't get the report.
These are the C's, people that have to be forced to do the work, and that will eventually cause all the work to pile on everyone else. There's no fun in working in an environment like that and its a quick recipe for a burnout.
Government work tends to also have structured pay scales that rise based on time worked and less so or not at all on performance. If the end result of working your tail off or doing the bare minimum is the same x% cost of living “raise”, no rational employee would put in any effort.
It tends to be the reason so many Americans are anti-union. They do a lot of good for the average worker but they also carry along a lot of dead weight that can’t easily be shed.
"Scientific management" was largely developed to control soldiering, which is when workers move in lockstep at the rate of the slowest worker. Unions restore soldiering somewhat, or at least make it possible to negotiate the rate of output and the pay rate.
In the same way we have the concept of 10x, 1x and negative-x devs, other trades have faster and slower tradespeople. Anti-union American laborers usually believe that they can outrun their fellow workers while making the additional money that implies. Unions say that they're beggaring their neighbor and the end result is they will be paid the same for more work.
Most unions focus on things like seniority, which is a bit of a detriment to everything but is very reinforcing to the union. The most senior people have a lot to protect, and by the time the junior people achieve some seniority, they have invested a lot of time in the system. A union oriented around productivity or skills would have less strength as its members aged, and it would be easier to poach the high performers into a non-union position.
Indeed. And when the C is unmanaged, creating needless work for others (review code that doesn’t work, etc), making a negative contribution to forward progress, then the rest of the As and Bs are looking around wondering why this person is not fired.
Because it's not blatantly obvious what is a B versus a C until after the fact.
So you
1. Reduce morale of Bs with potential. Layoffs or just reducing opportunity affects the whole team
2. Enforce stereotype threat on Bs you've miscategorized, reducing their performance and turning them into Cs.
It probably affects the As too, but I know I'm not there yet, so I can't speak on it.