If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management. If nothing else, it makes the productive workers annoyed to see someone coasting.

But this employee wasn't retained?

> If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management.

I think I agree but it isn’t that simple in many countries/legal jurisdictions. You can’t always just fire someone and performance managing an employee is utterly gruelling if the individual wants to make it so.

They could fire him legaly and some did.

My point was that low productivity is fault of manager sometimes, but other times it is fully fault of the low producing person. Especially when you a single low producing person in otherwise normally effective team.