Is job insecurity really the great motivator some managers believe it is? We crunched the numbers to find out
- Written by Lixin Jiang, Senior Lecturer, University of Auckland

Former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch famously promoted the “20-70-10” system to increase labour productivity. Managers were asked to rank employees on a bell curve; the top 20% received rewards, while the bottom 10% were fired.
Yahoo, Amazon and IBM, among many others, later adopted this performance review...