Your experience does not match mine as a manager. At any given moment a manager worth his/her pay is acutely aware who does what they said they'd do, who is capable of more than others, who solves more problems, who causes less fallout, who deserves that promo and raise and so on. There are always one or two people out of a dozen who, if they were to disengage, would doom the productivity of the team. So you want to keep your A players happy. The rest, you divide into two buckets essentially: B players aspiring to be A players, and everybody else. You keep the former happy. You don't really care about the latter and give them whatever is the default they'd normally get.
A lot of A players suck at negotiations, IMO. If they didn't, their career would advance much faster. It's much easier to negotiate if you have the goods, and very few people have the goods.
A lot of A players suck at negotiations, IMO. If they didn't, their career would advance much faster. It's much easier to negotiate if you have the goods, and very few people have the goods.