Sure there is also a bit of pride and sense of responsibility involved but shame and complications are strong drivers.
What do you think motivates people to avoid messing up at work?
I guess I'm assuming an American perspective because we were talking about an American company, but maybe others are not. I realize the stuff I'm saying does not apply in many other countries.
There are plenty of other jobs that will provide both healthcare and a good income. You get them by making yourself seem indispensable to the people with hiring authority. How do you do that? It varies by field. In software engineering you usually just need to seem personable and confident, ace all the Leetcode interviews, and have some basic subject matter relevant to the job. In finance, you need to know rich people, and you need to convince them to give you money to manage, which usually means feeding them some potentially profitable insight that they didn't think of themselves but can trade on and then offering to manage part of their portfolio in exchange for 2 & 20. In sales, you're doing this all the time (for your employer's product, not for yourself), so the interview is the job and the job is the interview. You don't need to actually be good at the job but you need to plant the idea in their head that you'd be better at it than they are, and so it's worth paying you to do it for them. In other words, be shameless.
Rational people, when they get fired, think "Oh, it's time to fall back on this algorithm until I get a new job." Irrational but normal people think it's a personal failing that they got fired and tend to avoid dealing with it until desperation (their bank statement) sets in. That also makes normal people very averse to being fired, but this makes them lack practice in the skills that will get a new job.
I read this as that it's inconvenient both from a psychological as well as a practical perspective.
You want to avoid shame/guilt, and you want to avoid the hassle of having to run to job interviews, get recommendation letters from old jobs, perhaps move to a new place closer to better employment, get a haircut etc. There are a lot of practical inconveniences to getting fired that could be classified as "logistical".
(the above is just my interpretation of what OP said)
The difference is entirely in how people view those consequences. For most line-level workers, getting fired or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a big logistical inconvenience. As a result, they'll do almost anything to avoid it, including making bad economic decisions for job security. For CEOs, it's an opportunity to do the same shit to other people. As a result, they have no inhibition toward taking risks that might potentially get them fired, as long as the payoff is worth it. And then part of the reason why CEO searches are so challenging and CEOs get paid so much is that it's hard to find someone who is rational about this - willing to take risks when the payoff is high, but prudent about it so they don't tank the company on a whim.